UW–Madison’s David Kaplan, the Hilldale Professor and Richard L. Venezky Professor of Educational Psychology, has been appointed by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics to lead a project to harmonize international and regional educational assessments.
This effort supports UNESCO’s mission to forecast progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goal of achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2030 across lower primary, upper primary, and lower secondary grades.
While international assessments such as OECD’s PISA and IEA’s TIMSS/PIRLS primarily focus on Global North countries, numerous high-quality regional assessments — such as the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) and the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE) — provide valuable data on Global South regions.
UNESCO’s initiative aims to unify the Global North and South assessments into a common measurement framework. This will enhance the ability to track the UN’s SDG indicator on the proportion of children and young people achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics, segmented by grade level and gender.
Kaplan will form an international team of experts in psychometrics, statistics, and educational policy to conduct a comprehensive study on this harmonization challenge. The project is expected to span four years, concluding ahead of the 2030 SDG target date.
Read the full article at: https://education.wisc.edu/news/uw-madisons-kaplan-tapped-by-unesco-to-lead-data-harmonization-efforts/