While large-scale assessments, either international (such as PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS, LLECE, PASEC, PILNA) or national, are used to measure minimum proficiencies in reading and mathematics a different grade levels such as for SDG 4.1.1, other SDG indicators like 4.5.1 (gender, rural/urban, wealth and other parity in education outcomes) and 4.6.1 (literacy and numeracy skills of youth and adults) require data collection to happen from outside the classroom.

A two-day workshop titles Learning through the Lifecycle in Multi-Topic National Household Surveys: Options for low-income countries, which took place in Washington in February 2020, was organized by the World Bank Group to explore the possibilities presented by assessing learning skills via household surveys, and set up the foundations for a collaborative work programme by agreeing to a strategy for integrating assessments of skills and learning across the lifecycle in regular household surveys. The workshop was convened by the Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) team, the Skills Thematic Group in the Education Global Practice, and the Living Standards measurement Study (LSMS) team in the Development Data Group at the World Bank and UIS. It brought together a mix of experts and institutions active in the collection of learning and skills assessment via different modalities, such as UIS, UNICEF, the World Bank, Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), OECD, Westat, Education Testing Services (ETS), and national statistics agencies and citizen-led assessment organizations from Mexico, Tanzania, and the West Bank and Gaza.

The workshop highlighted a number of instruments available at almost all stages of life and revealed the existence of an important implementation experience on which further progress could be built on. It successfully concluded in the elaboration of practical guidance for addressing technical challenges which are likely to arise or to be expected if multi-topic households were incorporated in learning or skills assessments, in identifying the knowledge gaps in learning data for low- and middle-income countries via household surveys, and in developing a network of experts and institutions who can work collaboratively to identify and support opportunities for skills and learning data collection in regular household surveys.

You can find the materials from the workshop on this website.