The First Year at School: An International Perspective

Dedication.- Foreword.- Part 1. History of the International Performance in Primary School Indicators project.- Chapter 1. A Reflection on Three Decades of Development.- Chapter 2. The First Year at School.  A Perspective from a Personal Standpoint.- Part 2. Introduction. The Challenge of Assessing Young Children's Progress Fairly and Making Comparisons.- Chapter 3. Educational Assessment of Young Children.- Chapter 4. International Comparative Assessments in Education.- Chapter 5. International Comparative Assessments of Young Children.  Debates and Methodology.- Chapter 6. Teachers' Roles in the Assessment of Young Children.- Part 3. Growth of the International Performance in Primary School Indicators.- Chapter 7. Packing 200 000 Years of Evolution in One Year of Individual Development. Developmental Constraints on Learning in the First Primary School Year.- Chapter 8. Children's Developmental Levels at the Start of School.- Chapter 9. Progress Made During the First Yearat School.- Part 4. The First Year at School. Education Inequality, Poverty and Children's Cognitive Development.- Chapter 10. Measures of Family Background in the iPIPS Project - Possibilities and Limits of Comparative Studies Across Countries.- Chapter 11. The Association Between Adverse Socio-Economic Circumstances and Cognitive Development within an International Context.- Part 5.  Using iPIPS Data for Teaching and Informing Policy.- Chapter 12. Strategies to enhance Pedagogical Use of iPIPS Data and to support Local Government Decision-Making in Brazil.- Chapter 13. Using Assessment Data to Inform Teaching. An Example from Lesotho.- Chapter 14. The Use of iPIPS Data for Policy Assessment, Government Evidence-Based Decision Making and Pedagogical Use by Schools in Russia.- Chapter 15. Using data to inform teaching. An example from the Western Cape, South Africa.- Chapter 16. iPIPS Research Evidence. Case Studies to Promote Data Use.- Part 6.  Novel and Unexpected Findings

Peter Tymms, After taking a degree from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences Peter Tymms taught in a wide variety of schools from Central Africa to the north-east of England before starting an academic career. He was "Lecturer in Performance Indicators" at Moray House, Edinburgh before moving to Newcastle University and then to Durham University where he was promoted to Professor of Education. He is now an Emeritus Professor.

 

His main research interests include monitoring, assessment, performance indicators, ADHD, reading and research methodology. He originated the PIPS project, which was designed to monitor the affective and cognitive progress of children through primary schools starting with a computer adaptive on-entry baseline assessment. It has been used with more than a million children  worldwide.  Peter Tymms was Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) until 2011 when he took over as Head of Department and Chair of the Board of Studies in the School of Education. At present he is devoting some of his time to an international project designed to study children starting school around the world. The project is known as iPIPS.

 

Tiago Bartholo is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interest includes the robust evaluation of education as a lifelong process, focused on issues of effectiveness, equity, and well-being. He has more than sixteen years of experience teaching at schools, universities, and working on research and professional projects in Brazil, England, and Spain. Worked as a consultant for the FNDE (National Fund for the Development of Education, 2009-2010), the Ministry of Education (Programa Segundo Tempo, 2010-2011), Carlos Chagas Foundation, São Paulo (2014-2020), the Interamerican Development Bank (2017-2018) and the United Nations Development Program (PNUD Brasil, 2022). He has published