Editorial: Evaluating education and improving it

Assessment is an important part of any education system. Without assessment, we cannot be sure that students are learning anything, because, as many countries have found, the amount of time students spend in school is a poor guide to how much they have actually learned (Pritchett, 2013). However, assessment is often unpopular with key stakeholders in education for a variety of reasons. In some systems it is used to hold teachers and schools to account for the quality of education provided, and when stakes are high, formal assessments can be stressful for students and their parents and carers. But even where the stakes are low, assessment is often seen as taking time from more valuable activities, such as teaching. The result is that in any education system, the assessment system in place is the result of a large number of trade-offs. We cannot get rid of the trade-offs, but we can make them explicit, so that we are better able to judge whether the balances we strike are ones with wh