International Assessment of Educational Progress:
Jordan’s Experience

by Victor Billeh

In 1990, Jordan became the first Arab country to participate in the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP II). Like many countries in the region, Jordan had pursued and achieved the goal of compulsory basic education (grades one to ten) over the preceding two decades. By the 1980s, the rapid expansion of its education system had started depleting the quality of its output. Furthermore, the education system could not keep pace with the rapid economic and technological changes throughout the world: Graduating students were no longer prepared for the needs of the job market. Finally, Jordan’s own economy was in crisis. It had therefore become crucial for Jordan to diagnose the problems of its education system, with the goal of increasing its performance and matching education to a changing socio-economic environment.

Coincidentally but fortunately, the IAEP II study was launched simultaneously with Jordan’s effort to undertake a thorough critique of its education system that could be used to design a comprehensive reform program. As a result, the country enthusiastically participated in this international study. The IAEP process not only provided crucial data on Jordan’s educational performance (at the 8th-grade level), but also allowed Jordanian educational specialists the opportunity to learn the techniques that such an exercise involves — including sample selection, administration of the tests, and implementation monitoring. The IAEP II study was to be instrumental in building a national capacity for independently conducting national surveys of education progress in the future, the kind of capacity the Jordanian education authorities had been lacking. Although the Ministry of Education had been undertaking national examinations at the end of Grades 9 and 12, those tests did not constitute a standardized sample-based national survey of student achievement.

Although Jordan’s experience of participating in this study has been positive, the results of the study came as a shock: With only 40 percent of questions answered correctly in mathematics and 57 percent in science, Jordan stood third from the bottom in both subjects among the 20 participating countries. A five-member expert committee was subsequently established to investigate the causes of this poor performance. After an item-by-item examination of the test and school curricula, as well as administration of practice tests, Jordan re-administered the tests. The results were almost identical to those of the IAEP II, confirming that neither the instruments nor the testing procedures were at fault. Now that it had greater confidence in the test as an assessment tool and greater expertise in test administration, the National Center for Human Resources Development (NCHRD) repeated the IAEP II study in 1992 on a fresh national sample of Jordanian schools and included a sample of West Bank schools as well. The data were analyzed to investigate differences between Jordan and the West Bank and within each country. The data from the Jordanian sample were again almost identical to those obtained during the first round of testing.

The data obtained from the IAEP II served generally to inform efforts to reform educational quality; more specifically, it served to:

• establish benchmarks of 13-year-olds’ achievements in mathematics and science vis-ˆ-vis the performance of 19 other countries worldwide;
• show the areas of weakness and strength in each subject;
• compare the performance of students in schools run by different education authorities in Jordan, in different administrative regions and in urban versus rural areas;
• identify certain cognitive processes involved in learning and respond with a view to informing teachers’ pre-service and in-service training programs;
• analyze the family and home characteristics that are associated with student achievement in mathematics and science; and
• target the negative and positive influences of various classroom practices, out-of school student activities, and student attitudes on achievement in mathematics and science.

Jordan’s experience with measuring national learning outcomes continued along several fronts after the IAEP II. In Jordan, thanks to the training received during the IAEP II and to the establishment of an education management information system, NCHRD is now able to conduct sample-based national assessments of education achievement on a regular basis. In addition, a longitudinal study (the National Assessment of Instructional Quality) was administered in 1993 and replicated in 1995, which should enable it to provide the baseline data necessary to assess the impact of the educational reform implemented in 1995. Availability of data from these various studies has prompted policy-oriented research and publications on education quality.

Within the MENA region, other countries have expressed interest in learning from Jordan’s example and experiences in the field of quality assessment. Concretely, Jordan has provided technical support through NCHRD to Lebanon, Oman, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza to reproduce studies that follow the IAEP II model. So far, however, only a limited number of countries in the region have participated in international comparative studies of their educational systems. In view of the education quality problems that are typical of MENA, as well as the benefits Jordan has accrued from its experience, more of the region’s countries are expected to join in similar exercises in the future.

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