In The Netherlands, the National Institute for Educational Measurement (Cito) has developed the Cito Monitoring and Evaluation System. This monitoring and evaluation system consists of a coherent set of nationally standardized tests for longitudinal assessment of pupil achievement throughout education including a system for manual or automated registration of pupil progress. The system for primary education contains not just tests for measuring sub-skills of language (including decoding and reading comprehension) and mathematics, but also tests for social-emotional development and study skills such as using study texts and schemes, tables and graphs. The results of the successive assessments in the monitoring and evaluation system are converted to the same fixed scale (this possibility is offered by a measuring technique based on item response theory) so that the progress of pupils can be monitored over a number of years.

Although the primary purpose of the monitoring and evaluation system was to provide a system that enabled the schools to follow the position and progress of individual pupils in a number of subjects, the system gradually evolved to serve a dual purpose: apart from providing schools and teachers with detailed information on individual pupils, it also gives information on higher levels of aggregation, such as the grade and the school.

In this presentation, an overview of the Cito Monitoring and Evaluation System will be given. First the content of the system will be discussed briefly, then a sample of the reports that are available for the users of the system will be discussed. Specific attention will be given to the reports at school level and to the use of this monitoring and evaluation system as a system for school self-improvement in the Netherlands.