INTRODUCTION
The OECD's Education Policy Committee launched the Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes in 2009 to provide analysis and policy advice to countries on how different assessment and evaluation tools can be embedded within a consistent framework to bring about real gains in performance across the school system.The policy process needs to recognise that: reaching agreements on the design of the evaluation and assessment framework requires time for discussions and consultations with all stakeholders; developing expertise in the system, including training evaluators is expensive and requires time; conducting evaluation processes induces additional workload for school agents; and aligning broader school reforms such as professional development opportunities with evaluation and assessment strategies requires more educational resources.For example, there might be room for increased integration between teacher evaluation, school evaluation and school development, between the evaluation system and overall educational research, between evaluation and the labour market, and so on.
Policy development needs to involve a reflection on the different components of the framework such as school assessment, teacher appraisal, or standardised national-level student tests to assess students' progress, and ways in which they can be articulated to achieve the purposes of the framework.GOVERNANCE AND IMPLEMENTATION
Ensuring articulations within the evaluation and assessment framework
Every country typically has provisions for student assessment, teacher evaluation, school evaluation and system evaluation, but often these are not explicitly integrated and there is no strategy to ensure that the different components of the framework can mutually reinforce each other.Since evaluation has strong stakes for the units assessed and since school outcomes heavily depend on individual relationships and cooperation at the school level, successful feedback mechanisms require particular attention to developing competencies and defining responsibilities in the evaluation process.Developing competencies for evaluation and for using feedback
The effectiveness of evaluation and assessment relies to a great extent on ensuring that both those who design and undertake evaluation activities as well as those who use their results possess the proper skills and competencies.This Issues Note outlines common policy challenges emerging from the analysis undertaken in the Review and is designed to stimulate discussion about evaluation and assessment policies among and within countries as the review proceeds.Other obstacles may be a sense of unfairness by those being evaluated, excessive bureaucratic demands on schools, lack of resources to implement evaluation policies or inadequate dissemination of evaluation results by the media.The Review includes a thorough analysis of the evidence on evaluation and assessment, in-depth review of evaluation and assessment policies in a range of countries and a synthesis report comparing country experience and drawing out general lessons for policy development.It is important to explore the role of bargaining processes as well as that of incentive structures in facilitating compliance with new policies, as a way to ensure policy implementation in the longer term.A number of strategies can reinforce the linkages between the evaluation and assessment framework and classroom practice.