Cross-cultural Comparability of SAM results

<p>Education professionals and policy makers are interested to have accurate information on such topics as &quot;which country&#39;s schoolchildren know math better?&quot; or &quot;what country has students that read more?&quot;. In order to answer these questions they require measurement instruments that would allow cross-cultural comparisons. Of course, cross-cultural comparability of test results is not a given and needs to proven first.</p><p>There are two types of measurement instruments in this respect: the ones that were developed from the start for cross-cultural assessment and the ones that were initially meant only for one culture but were later adapted for use in other cultures. Extensive instructions on test development and creating unified scales already exist for the first type of assessment, which has the obvious advantage of foresight. However in the case of adapted assessments there is still no universally agreed upon set of measures that would guarantee cross-cultural comparability of test&nbsp; results.</p><p>In this study we investigate the cross-cultural viability of the Student Achievement Monitoring (SAM) assessment. SAM was originally created to assess the various subject-based achievement of Russian-speaking students but was later translated into other languages (Kyrgyz, Tajik, Kazakh). Our goal is to arrive at a scale useful for cross-cultural comparison of the SAM test results.</p>