This collection presents educational assessment research from Latin America, adding to a relatively small but growing body of research considering educational assessment and evaluation issues in this large region. The predominance of Chile reflects its early highly centralized education system, and the fact that it adopted national testing before other Latin American countries. It was also an early participant in international assessment programmes. Other countries have followed the trend of implementing national testing, and to a lesser extent participating in international surveys. The complementary development of technical expertise in quantitative research methods has enabled extensive analysis of the large data sets generated by these testing and assessment programmes.

Taken together, the evidence reported provides a means not only of reviewing educational quality issues in Latin America, but also of facilitating comparisons that allow the context specificity of equivalent research conducted in western developed countries to be considered.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.