International assessments by Colombia – Results in focus about our educational quality

Abstract

Colombian results related to international assessments (TIMSS, PISA and SERCE) generate a critical reflection about our educational quality, regardless scores since 20 years ago (TIMSS, 1995). Understanding relevance of these assessments demands understanding the concept of “quality of education” based on the UNESCO proposal, particularly those components of equality, relevance and adequacy to any process linked to student learning, which aims to solve the four major challenges facing education – overcoming poverty, reduce inequalities, fight corruption, and strengthen democracy. But this proposal is not detached from learning, something critical to the educational process. Howard Gardner mainly focused to a comprehensive formation of the human being involved in several social processes. Neither the proposed disclaims emotional intelligence as an essential component of the teacher-student relationship, which provides something significant to the knowledge acquisition and human development. Finally, it is very important to analyze particularly how those results are produced in international assessments, showing its usefulness in order to understand the educational processes. The final reflection highlights school/reality linkage related to student learning and student/teacher relationship where a possibility to improve the educational quality is based on the educational system (standards) proposed.