Los estudios internacionales del rendimiento y los países en vías de desarrollo: participación, resultados y relevancia

Authors

J. Enrique Froemel AndradeSalto de línea Consultor de la Oficina Regional de Educación para América Latina y Caribe (OREALC/UNESCO).

Abstract

International Studies on Achievement and the Developing Countries: Participation, Results and RelevanceSalto de línea Salto de línea The purpose of the present article is to provide a general outlook on the international studies about school achievement from the point of view of the developing countries. In order to accomplish this goal, the author focuses on selected PISA and TIMSS studies as well as on the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE). Firstly, a new definition of the status of «developing countries» is presented, although just to satisfy the study’s goals. The result is a new synthetic conceptualization based on four approaches to such condition, which relies mainly on the World Bank’s classification and the Bertelesmann Transformation Index. Secondly, the article tackles a revision of the participation of the developing countries in six selected international studies; such revision is carried out on the basis of official reports following the studies, being presented both as a whole and considering different regions of the world. Then, certain tendencies are analysed while several conclusions are also raised. Afterwards, the article goes deeply into the results got by the developing countries in the six studies mentioned above. Both the analysis and the conclusions are solely based on the relative positions held by the countries in these studies and on those concerning their national outcomes with respect to general or referential average results. Apart from the attention drawn on the dependent variables already mentioned, which are represented in this case through achievement outcomes, the relation between such variables and those having to do with the socio-economic background is also dealt with, both from the individual and the school points of view. Then, in the case of the developing countries, these relationships are examined taking into account the issues included in the reports of the respective studies. Concerning the latter, a major level of information was detected in PISA than in TIMSS. Finally, the article inquires into the specific relevance of international studies for the developing countries by means of providing a previous and concise discussion on this matter, which applies to all countries in general. Similarly, it deals shortly with the relevance of the participation of the developing countries in these studies.

Keywords

Developing countries, international evaluation studies, results, achievement, PISA, TIMSS.