Building educational evaluation capacity in developing countries

Relatively few developing countries have established a sustainble capacity for educational monitoring and evaluation. As a result, the efforts of governments and assistance agencies to improve education have been hampered by lack of information on outcomes and costs. World Bank experience with educational evaluation has been disappointing, emphasizing monitoring of project inputs with little attention to outcomes or costs. In the United States, educational evaluation has become an integral part of education management. Large scale research studies have given way to student achievement testing and localized evaluations that provide decision makers with information useful in improving the quality of schools. These results were achieved through federal policy and funding support for evaluation. Similar investment strategies can be used in developing countries. However the strategies should be incremental, first putting systems in place at relatively low levels of technical sophistication, then raising the technical level as institutional capacity is developed.