Invitation to Tender for Literature Review into Student Assessment

UK school quality assurance system has a long-standing reputation worldwide. In China, assessment and quality assurance has led the new wave of education reform in the recent years. In order to promote UK-China exchanges and collaboration in this filed, the British Council have developed a number of initiatives with partners and would like to invite tenders to provide services for Literature Review into Student Assessment.

The British Council and the Wuhan Academy of Educational Science are working on developing and piloting a comprehensive student assessment and evaluation system, so it drives the system towards a direction that supports the promotion of all-rounded development of young people. Through the project we also aim to capacity build policy makers and practitioners, and enable school based pilot/implementation to finally inform decision making.

Literature review is the starting point of the project which is to provide project team the international evidence on effective assessment systems and support the design and development of the local formative and summative evaluation system.

Scope of Work:
Objectives:
1. Allow Wuhan project research team to study international evidence on effective assessment systems and uses this information to inform planning in Wuhan.
2. Refer to psychometrics (Item Response Theory and Generalizability Theory) applications in the assessment, Wuhan researchers/statisticians/psychometricians are able to analyse data from quantitative pilot.
3. In collaboration with stakeholders (e.g. headteachers, parents, teachers, municipal officials), Wuhan could design systems for reporting and communicating results from formative and summative assessments.

Output:
To product research report for the following component(s):

The research will cover two components. At the end of the research, an evidence based report will be produced for each of the two components. We ask agencies to set out the approach and methodology they propose to use and the data sources (existing and/or to be collected as part of this project) they would use in order to meet the objectives for the research.

Component I will focus on value added assessment in primary and secondary school
• The policy and practices for value added assessment in summative assessment, mainly in the UK, but also including other countries such as Holland etc.
• The ways of data analysis
• The challenges and obstacles encountered during the process. And the solutions to address. The experience and lessons accumulated
• 5-6 case studies from the UK and other countries

The research should be carried out from national, institutional and individual level.

Component II will focus on application of assessment tool on student assessment in primary and secondary school

• Generalizability Theory (GT) ‘s application in the assessment result
• Item Response Theory (IRT)’s application in the assessment result
• 5-6 case studies

The research should not to describe the theory itself, but focus on how to use data to analysis the assessment result.