Assessment of National Learning Assessment Systems in Ethiopia

• In Event: How to generate and use knowledge and evidence for education policy reform: perspectives on the potential of GPE's new financing mechanisms

Proposal

The ANLAS Focal Point or another member of the ANLAS national team from Ethiopia will present Ethiopia’s experience of piloting the Assessment of National Learning Assessment Systems (ANLAS) diagnostic tool between November 2018 and March 2019 as a global public good.

ANLAS will cover all levels of school education, all schools within the system (public, private, community) and central as well as decentralized levels. The scope of the diagnostic is based on the very notion of a learning assessment system. As such the ANLAS will focus on examining the extent to which the learning assessment system of a country is embedded and articulated in regard to other elements of the education system (e.g. curriculum, textbooks, teacher education/training, classroom instruction, EMIS), since it is ultimately such integration which favors the use of assessment as a tool for improving learning. In addition, it is known that there are a variety of ways in which education systems may make use of assessment, such as goal setting, resource allocation, curriculum development, decisions on instructional practice and workplace development. ANLAS will also examine the extent to which learning assessment in a given country is used to inform policy in view of improving practice and most importantly, learning itself.

Furthermore, ANLAS will assess the range of different means whereby students’ learning is assessed. This includes the traditional national examinations, large-scale assessments (be they national, regional or international or through non-traditional means such as being conducted in the household, by citizens’ groups, etc.) as well as classroom-based assessment. Further still, ANLAS will also assess the extent to which learning assessment systems incorporates the expanded notion of the different domains of learning put forth by the deliberations of the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) and the policy priority that many countries are placing on the so-called “21st century skills” (also referred to as “non-cognitive skills”, “transversal competencies”, “social and emotional learning” and a number of other monikers).

ANLAS aims to enable countries to use the analysis from the diagnostic to develop a robust strategy for strengthening its national learning assessment system and to operationalize this strategy through the next iterations of its Education Sector Plan. As such, it illustrates how a tool developed under the initial KIX work can feed into a country’s broader education sector planning process and support system change in education. The experience from Ethiopia will provide a concrete example of how ANLAS has been applied and feeds into this process.

Author

• Ramya Vivekanandan, Global Partnership for Education