The First Year at School: An International Perspective

This book explores an under-researched but vital part of education: the first year at primary/elementary school. The work shows that children’s progress varies enormously from school to school, class to class and child to child. This variation is important because the more progress that children make in that first year of school, the higher their academic attainment at the end of compulsory schooling.

The iPIPS (international Performance Indicators in Primary Schools) project, upon which this book is based, has been able to provide deeper insights into some of the key issues within and across different contexts whilst highlighting new and some ongoing issues. Despite all the work there remain unanswered or new puzzling issues which are also explored.

We need to know how to improve the education at that stage and, more broadly, we need greater clarity about when children should be taught to read and be introduced to formal arithmetic, in other words, when they should start school.  We also need to be clearer about whether, when and how young children should be assessed. The book will suggest some answers but it will raise important questions and dilemmas for which we do not, as yet, have answers.

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 extensivelyin Brazil and internationally in peer-reviewed journals. Visiting researcher at Durham University, England (2014 and 2017), University of Birmingham, England, (2012 and 2013), and the University of León, Spain (2009). Tiago is currently one of the leading researchers in a national impact study of Covid-19 on students’ development and well-being in Brazil, helping design a national recovery plan for public education.

Sarah Howie is the founding Director of the Africa Centre for Scholarship, Director of Unit for International Credentialling and Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa since 2017.  Previously she was the founding Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment (CEA) and Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, at the University of Pretoria for 17 years.

Her career began at the Foundation for Research Development (now the National Research Foundation) after she had completed her undergraduate and honours degrees from Stellenbosch University and University of Cape Town respectively. She obtained her Master’s degree in Education from University of Witwatersrand, whilst working fulltime at the Human Sciences Research Council. She completed her PhD at the University of Twente, the Netherlands and thereafter established the research Centre for Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Pretoria where she was appointed as a Research Director in 2001 and Full Professor in 2007-2017. She has published extensively internationally in peer-reviewed journals and edited and co-edited books. She has served as the National Research Coordinator of the IEA’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1995 (Pop3), 1999; Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006, 2011, 2016 and Second International Technology in Education Study (SITES) 1999 and 2006 focused on international assessments in primary and secondary schools. She was also the national coordinator for the Nuffield Foundation funded International Primary Indicators in Primary School (iPIPS) study. She was inducted into the Academy of Science for South Africa in 2006.

Internationally, she was a member of the UNESCO-Brookings Institute international Learning Metrics Task Force for Post-primary (in preparation for Education for All 2015) She was also a member of five international technical research committees associated with design and development of international large-scale assessments of the International Association for Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) (PIRLS 2011 & 2015 and TALIS) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) (PISA 2015 & 2018).  She is a member of a number of Editorial Boards of international Journals including those in the Taylor and Francis and Elsevier publishing houses. She currently serves on the IEA’s International Publications Committee.

Elena Kardanova, With a PhD degree in mathematics fromSaint Petersburg State University Elena Kardanova has worked as a director of the Centre for Psychometrics and Educational Measurement with National Research University Higher School of Economics since 2013. She is a Tenured Professor at HSE and a scientific adviser of the master Program Science of Learning and Assessment. She teaches psychometrics to master and PhD students.

Her main research interests include psychometrics, test development, Item Response Theory, Rasch modelling, assessing complex constructs and adjacent research areas. Elena Kardanova authors many research papers and was and still is in charge of many research projects including international ones. In particular, she initiated iPIPS in Russia in 2014 and supervised the development of its Russian-language version.

Mariane Koslinski is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education and the Educational Opportunities Research Laboratory coordinator at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently the coordinator of Research Committee 17 Education and Society of the Brazilian Society of Sociology. Her research areas include social inequality and education, educational policy and program implementation and evaluation, residential segregation and educational inequalities.

Christine Merrell started work as a biological scientist before becoming a teacher and studying for a masters degree  at Newcastle University where she got a distinction. She then took on the role of Research Associate for PIPS in the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM). Her doctorate studied the attainment of  pupils with ADHD characteristics in schools. That work led to a series of publications and grants as well as membership of the relevant NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) Committee. Christine rose through the ranks in CEM to become a Director before moving to the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health as Deputy Pro-VC for research.

Christine was an important figure in the iPIPS project and in the editing of this book until she passed away in 2021, well before her time.

Helen Wildy grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in rural Western Australia and attended a one teacher school before completing her secondary schooling at a boarding school in the capital city, Perth, and attending The University of Western Australia (UWA) to prepare to become a Mathematics teacher. After teaching in Western Australia and Victoria, Helen completed Masters and Doctoral degrees again at UWA. Helen worked closely with school systems in WA, developing school principals’ leadership capacity and skills to use national assessment program data to improve teaching and learning. Subsequently she spent 30 years in academic positions in 3 of WA’s universities, including the final decade as Dean of Education at UWA where she was responsible for teaching and research, and the preparation of teachers. Throughout that time, her particular interest was the teaching and learning of children in their first year of school, and she coordinated the PIPS project across Australia for 20 years. She is now an Emeritus Professor. As well as volunteer roles as a Guide at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Director of a charity supporting the teaching and learning of children in Bhutan, Helen is currently Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor of Murdoch University in WA.