The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) is a nonprofit organization made up of institutional members (universities, research institutes, inspectorates, ministries) active in the field of monitoring progress in education. Decades of experience and research have enabled IEA to create a robust data infrastructure and develop the highest academic standards for measuring trends in educational outcomes, which in turn creates a meaningful basis for measuring global progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 and provides strong foundations on which to build relevant metrics.

Data and documentation from ongoing studies are added to IEA’s data repository after each international study report release and IEA provides free software, supporting publications and research tools, to help researchers working with the large-scale assessment data.

More than 60 countries are actively involved in the IEA network, and more than one quarter of the world's countries can already be counted as participants in IEA studies, which measure students' mastery of subjects such as mathematics and science (TIMSS), reading and literacy (PIRLS), civic and citizenship education (ICCS); and computer and information literacy (ICILS).

IEA is committed to ensuring that the results of these comparative research projects reach a wide audience of researchers, policymakers, technical experts, educators, and all others working to enhance teaching and learning around the world. IEA publications serve as important vehicles to highlight the IEA’s study findings, as well as to advance the science of measurement and facilitate secondary analysis and re-views of the data and findings by all interested audiences.

In recent years there has been significant growth in the number of IEA publications and their reach. At the same time, ILSAs are large and complex studies. They take time to conduct and getting reliable information out there quickly can be challenging, as was highlighted by the data deficit during the educational disruption caused by COVID-19, in which education systems increasingly looked towards international policy experiences, data and analyses as they developed their own policy responses but often lacked data. High quality data is key to improving the education provision across countries and part of achieving this is having different publications that translate findings into different formats for a range of audiences.

During the panel different formats of IEA publications will be discussed, including special issues of the journal Large-scale Assessments in Education, volumes of the IEA Research for Education, and IEA Compass: Briefs in Education Series as well as newly emerging approaches to IEA publications for educators and special standalone volumes, like the ICCS Influences book released in 2021.

Authors from this special ICCS Influences publication will reflect on the usefulness of IEA data, their approach to map what research was done previously, identify relevant and emerging interests, and highlight what was lacking within existing research. Also discussed in the panel will be the relevance of understanding what is happening in the context of different countries, their local actors, and what findings are most relevant to these.

The panel session aims to consider the multitude of factors that have influenced the growth of IEA’s publication portfolio, and how this work can continue to be shaped moving forward and to support research communities working in specific fields of educational research or accommodate new stakeholder audiences. Publications will be discussed as unitary items, bringing together different authors from different fields and expertise, to collaborate and exchange ideas to create a coherent story at the end towards improving education.

Wagemaker, H. eds. (2020): Reliability and Validity of International Large-Scale Assessment, SPRINGER https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-53081-5