LEA Large-scale Educational Assessment

The research group “Large-scale Educational Assessment” (LEA) is aimed at developing and validating large-scale assessments, addressing relevant questions in education based on large-scale assessment data, and disseminating the findings obtained from large-scale assessment data analysis to a broad audience.

Big data is watching. Sticker on lightpost. Photo.

How do we ensure the reliability and validity of large-scale assessment instruments? This is one of the questions the group focuses on. Ilustration photo: ev/Unsplash.

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Educational assessments are critical to educational research, practice, and policy-making. In fact, evaluating what works and what doesn’t in education stands and falls with the availability of reliable and validated assessments.

The quality of educational assessments is especially important in the context of national and international large-scale studies (e.g., TIMSS, PISA, TALIS), as they inform educational research, practice, and policy-making from a comparative perspective.

Three focus areas

Research activities are organized in three focus areas, namely "Knowledge about educational assessments, Knowledge from educational assessments, and Knowledge dissemination", and make explicit the interplay between research, education, and dissemination.

Knowledge about educational assessments

Constructing measures and evaluating the validity of (large-scale) educational assessments

Knowledge from educational assessments

Addressing educationally relevant research questions using data obtained from (large-scale) educational assessments

Knowledge dissemination

Communicating findings and quality indicators of assessments to different audiences and synthesizing existing research

Opportunities for PhD candidates

LEA hosts PhD-projects that generate knowledge about and from large-scale assessments and disseminate this knowledge to relevant audiences. Being a PhD candidate in the LEA research group means

to have unique opportunities to work with national and international large-scale data,
to shape the future of these assessments in Norway, and
to access an experienced team of supervisors and scholars in the field.