OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: North Macedonia
How can assessment and evaluation policies work together more effectively to improve student outcomes in primary and secondary schools? The country reports in this series analyse major issues facing evaluation and assessment policy to identify improvements that can be made to enhance the quality, equity and efficiency of school education.
The Republic of North Macedonia has made remarkable progress in expanding access to education and strengthening institutional capacity. Yet, the majority of young Macedonians leave school without mastering the basic competencies for life and work and students’ background continues to influence performance. This review, developed in cooperation with UNICEF, provides North Macedonia with recommendations to help strengthen its evaluation and assessment system, by moving towards a system where assessment provides students with helpful feedback to improve learning. It will be of interest to North Macedonia, as well as other countries looking to make more effective use of their evaluation and assessment system to improve quality and equity, and result in better outcomes for all students.
Creating a stronger framework to monitor and evaluate national progress in education
The system evaluation of the Republic of North Macedonia is at a nascent stage of development and, despite progress, still lacks basic components, such as clear objectives for improving learning outcomes and a national assessment that would support efforts to raise achievement. This chapter suggests that North Macedonia enhance its data collection and management to provide timely and high quality data with which to feed information into decision-making. The chapter also suggests how the assessment can be developed to monitor educational progress and provide formative information for improvement. Another priority is to elevate system evaluation to a key function in North Macedonia’s education system, by creating greater institutional capacity.