Educational assessment in Latin America: editorial

Assessment in Education is an international journal publishing articles relating to educational assessment in all parts of the world. As with many English language academic journals, articles from the western world are dominant, and understandably geographical regions are unevenly represented. This special issue focusing on Latin America goes some way to addressing this situation by encouraging contributions from the region. It follows other special issues featuring specific geographical areas, including China (Volume 21, Issue 3), sub-Saharan Africa (Volume 20, Issue 4) and Asia Pacific (Volume 16, Issue 3 and Volume 13, Issue 2), in line with the journal’s aims. The editorial in the inaugural issue of Assessment in Education published in 1994 drew attention to the need for assessment developments ‘to be explored in a range of different educational contexts and national systems’ (pp.7–8). A number of articles relating to educational assessment in Latin America have and will be published in other issues, and complement those gathered together here. Indeed, space limitations and other considerations mean that some current articles concerning the region are being published in regular issues (e.g. Helman, Delbridge, Parker, Arnal, & Mödinger, 2015). The journal has also carried a review of international science assessment in developing countries that included reference to Chile, Colombia and Mexico (Johnson, 1999), a paper tracing the expansion of testing in Latin America (Schiefelbein & Schiefelbein, 2003), and profiles of the educational assessment systems in Argentina (Gvirtz & Larripa, 2004) and Chile (Meckes & Carrasco, 2010).