Baku hosts opening ceremony of IAEA 2019 conference

The State Examination Center of Azerbaijan is hosting the opening ceremony of the 45th International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA) Annual Conference. The six-day conference is themed "Assessment and Decision-making: Individual and Institutional Solutions".

The IAEA 2019 brings together more than 300 delegates from 55 countries. It features a number of sessions, focusing on Policy-making, Higher education, Assessment systems, standards, methods and strategies, Diagnostic assessment, Psychological assessment, Classroom assessment, Language assessment, Assessment review systems, Assessment reforms, Teacher training and assessment, Testing in primary education, Validity, Quality assurance in testing, and other topics. On September 27, post-conference workshops will be held.

Addressing the event, IAEA President Randy Bennett highlighted the goal of the association, and hailed the State Examination Center’s efforts towards hosting the conference in Azerbaijan again.

Head of the Department for Humanitarian Policy Issues of the Presidential Administration Farah Aliyeva read out First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva’s message of congratulations to the participants of the 45th Annual Conference of the International Association for Educational Assessment.

Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the State Examination Center Maleyka Abbaszade expressed her gratitude to First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva for the kind words and for the attention.

“It was in 2007 when we first time hosted in Baku the annual conference of the International Association for Educational Assessment. And it's so nice to see today in this hall some of our colleagues and old friends from the previous conferences. Twelve years have passed since that event. We have changed and the world was undergoing a lot of the theoretical, cultural and technological developments. They affect teaching, learning and education. With such potentially seismic changes in education must also come changes in educational assessment. For several decades now, assessment has become an increasingly pressing educational priority and it now dominates most conversations about reform.

Testing and public reporting of achievement is seen to be one of the few tools capable of clearly informing public policy makers and communities alike about how their resources are being used to expand the life opportunities for their children.

As we learned from our experience and from the last year conference in Oxford on "Assessment and Big Data" for most assessments the lack of data is not a problem. In fact, there's often too much information, too much data available to make a clear decision. That's why the theme of this year conference is trying to address the challenging topic of "Assessment and Decision-Making," Maleyka Abbaszade said.

In his remarks, Minister of Education Jeyhun Bayramov hailed the importance of the event.

Deputy Foreign Minister, Rector of ADA University Hafiz Pashayev praised Azerbaijan’s significant achievements in developing a transparent and reliable assessment process in education.

The conference will provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to share their understandings of current processes and findings, as well as to look at possibilities for setting-up new trends in assessment and decision-making.

On September 22, pre-conference workshops were held as part of the IAEA 2019. The workshops provided an insight into several topics, including "How to develop a tailor-made training course for sustainable transformation of education and assessment towards 21st century functional literacy”; "Is Assessment Fair? | Cambridge Assessment"; and "RCEC review system for the quality of examination". The workshops were conducted by leading scientists and researchers, including Nico Dieteren of Cito, the Netherlands, Isabel Nisbet and Stuart D. Shaw of Cambridge Assessment, and Arnold Brouwer of RCEC, the Netherlands.

In 2007, Azerbaijan State Examination Center hosted the 33rd International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA) Annual Conference. It was elected a member of the IAEA Executive Committee in 2008.

Azerbaijan State News Agency (AZERTAC) is the official media partner of the State Examination Center in covering the IAEA 2019.

AZERTAC