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.
See also the overview of connected PhD-projects.