Our contribution focuses on the role of educational research in creation of Swiss French common culture regarding evaluation: an object with a highly political dimension.

Switzerland is a small but complex country with 26 cantons and four cultural regions: Swiss German, Swiss French, Swiss Italian and Romansh. There is no federal ministry of education. Education is mainly under the responsibility of cantons: cantons are fully in charge of compulsory education and partially in charge of upper secondary education (Behrens, 2016). The 26 cantons ministers of education form a political body: the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK). The EDK tries to harmonize the Swiss educational structures through intercantonal agreements (known as concordats) (Behrens, 2016). There are two intercantonal and interregional political bodies: the Conference of French-speaking Cantonal Ministers of Education (CIIP) and the Conference of German-speaking Cantonal Ministers of Education (D-EDK). Both ensure interregional coordination.

Like in most European countries, the first results of the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) survey caused an important shock in Switzerland (Nidegger, 2001) and led to a few major changes (Behrens, 2016). At national level, the EDK speeded up the harmonization process called concordat HarmoS (Lafontaine, Soussi & Nidegger, 2009). The concordat harmonized the structure of compulsory schooling, established national performance standards and imposed common monitoring instruments in order to control the quality of the system. At regional level, the CIIP initiated a pedagogical reform and implemented a new regional curriculum (known as PER) (Behrens, 2016). In this context, the Institute of pedagogical research and documentation (IRDP) has been mandated by the CIIP to conceive Swiss French common tests (called EpRoCom) on the basis of PER in order to verify the achievement of pedagogical objectives.

The PER is a teaching/learning referential which aims to improve students' skills and knowledge. It specifies for every field general aims, pedagogical objectives, learning progressions and fundamental expectations (i.e. what all pupils have to know at the end of each cycle) (Marc & Wirthner, 2013). The PER is not an assessment framework of reference (Sànchez Abchi, De Pietro & Roth, 2016). So, some issues have to be discussed by educational research (De Pietro, Roth & Sànchez Abchi, 2016) : what kind of objectives to evaluate? how to evaluate?...  Moreover, as the 7 Swiss French cantons have currently their own evaluative practices (Marc & Wirthner, 2013), the challenge is to use educational research results as a basis to create a Swiss French common culture regarding evaluation.

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