Abstract:

Up to now, Brazil's performance on international large-scale assessments, such as the Program for International Students Assessment (PISA), is poor and a way back from our neighbor countries in Latin America. To change this scenario and try to enhance students’ proficiency index in mathematics and Portuguese language, the Ministry of Education (MEC) created in the early 90's, the National Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB), aiming to understand the gaps children and teenagers have on their academic formative path. On the same hand, the States started to do the same movement on their own level, which is the case of the State of Ceará, whose state-level standard large-scale assessment has been performed since 1997, becoming a very useful and well-structured assessment supporting decision making.

The tricky point is how the assessment's outcomes could enhance students' learning experience on their regular year of formation using pedagogical feedback for teachers and principals. Unfortunately, since the large scale data processing takes time, the assessment outcome is released, at least, one months after the application. Since this problem of lack of just in-time feedback, the state Chief-Scientist Program and the Secretary of Education developed jointly the SISEDU platform. Nowadays, SISEDU is the responsible to process the assessment data using 3-paramether Item Response Theory (IRT) and Classical Test Theory (CTT), promoting feedback for teachers and principals and bringing scalability to assess simultaneously a large number of students, given also a repository of well-structured content material to help teachers dealing with any possible lack of students' knowledge that might come up with the test’s outcome.

In a total of 100.000 students, twice a year, are submitted for a diagnosis assessment via SISEDU and so their teachers have the opportunity to redirect their pedagogical path or approach in order to help students to better comprehend the content. Therefore, this paper aims to present a general SISEDU framework, regarding its data processing and and how it is helping the State of Ceará to improve education, becoming a benchmark for Brazilian educational public policy. The framework includes all the technologies used to build the platform, the set of action that should be done and put as an input in SISEDU and a set of solutions available as an output.

Keywords:

Educational data processing, decision-making, large-scale assessment, pedagogical feedback.