The Prospects of Achievement Tests to Measure the Cognitive Skills of School-aged Children: The role of achievement tests to implement evidence-based policy making in education (Japanese)

In this paper, we review the "achievement tests" conducted in Japan and abroad over the past decades and then introduce the newly developed achievement test started by the local government in Saitama prefecture in 2015, which contains rich information to allow researchers to examine the optimal resource allocation in public education. Some prominent prospects of this achievement test include: (i) the academic ability of a group of students are estimated by using the Item Response Theory (IRT), making the students comparable even in different grades and years when the test was taken; (ii) the test was designed as panel data, which have tracked all student from G4 through G12; (iii) the questionnaires alongside the test include information on non-cognitive skills, parental socio-economic status, school/classroom resources, teacher quality, etc. This paper introduces the findings drawn from this achievement test and discusses the additional information needed for further improvement.