European Monitoring of Student Achievement in the Twenty-First Century: Summary and Outlook

Abstract

This book has highlighted through its 22 chapters different monitoring policies and practices across Europe. It has given readers an opportunity to understand the different strategies and used indicators. When it comes to monitoring and developing policies and practices, there are many similarities across the chapters of this book. In this last chapter, we give readers an overview of the entire book and summarize the information of the country-specific chapters in order to highlight the enablers and challenges across the different countries. Taken together, international large-scale assessments are an important tool in order to monitor or to benchmark student achievement, but they have limitations that need to be understood and discussed as well. These limitations need to be understood not only by researchers but also by policymakers. This is because the results of national and international assessments can be very powerful as they cause stimulating debates on the quality of educational systems going hand in hand with a critical reflection of existing challenges.