Measurement - In Practice

To remain within the consensus, I will concentrate for now on measuring the progress of the education system, and not of individual students. How do we measure our progress towards the goals we set to ourselves?

Short answer:
I don't know.

Longer answer:
International tests are a good start. For the simple goals, anyway.
Literacy: PIRLS - Progress in International Reading Literacy Study - attempts to create standard measurements relevant to the literacy goal set in the previous post. It should be expanded into testing ability to write, speak and listen. It is no accident that the test concentrates on reading - it is much easier to test reading: It is possible to use multiple choice questions, which lends themselves better to data processing. Testing the ability to listen and understand can also be done with multiple choices, but it's more difficult logistically: Recordings need to be distributed; placing the player in front of a whole class of students being tested, is tricky, since students close to the player hear it differently than those far from the player. So maybe a personal player for each student? Need more thought and experimentation (remember Research?) Testing ability to write and speak is even more difficult: How do we design a test that can objectively grade the quality of writing and speaking? How do we test the quality of communication? See my Short answer above.

Second Language: We may use an adapted version of the same PIRLS derivative as the one used for mother-tongue literacy. Possibly with a different mix of contexts - business, science, culture, etc. Possibly with more lenience for certain speaking and writing mistakes. Needs even more thought and experimentation.

Numeracy: TIMMS - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study - attempts to create standard measurements relevant to the numeracy goal set in the previous post. It can be adapted to test the specific details of the Foundation Layer Goal of Numeracy as defined before. At the level of detail used to discuss this goal so far, measurement seems relatively easy.

Measuring progress relating to other goals will be discussed when these goals become clearer.
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