Strengthening the national assessment system for managing education quality: international practice and policy priorities for uzbekistan

Reliable, well-managed national assessment systems are a precondition for evidence-based education policy, yet many transition economies still lack the institutional capacity to design, administer and use them effectively. This article examines the national system for assessing general secondary education quality in the Republic of Uzbekistan against a theoretical model of national assessment and against the practice of three countries with established systems — Australia (NAPLAN), the United States (NAEP) and Chile (SIMCE) — and against five other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Using comparative and statistical-economic analysis of policy documents, international assessment frameworks and World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI) data, the study finds that Uzbekistan's assessment infrastructure remains fragmented: no single body holds end-to-end responsibility for the assessment cycle, standardized instruments meeting international reliability and validity requirements are largely absent, and the country trained no domestic testing (psychometric) specialists before 2020. These gaps are reflected in outcomes: in its first participation in PIRLS (2021), PISA (2022) and TIMSS (2023), Uzbekistan scored well below international benchmarks, underperforming even the level implied by its 2020 Human Capital Index of 0.61. The article proposes a dedicated National Assessment Center with defined departments for item development, test administration, ICT, data analysis, publishing and psychometric quality assurance, and sets out priority actions for building specialist capacity, regulatory infrastructure and international cooperation. The findings are relevant to education policymakers across Central Asia and to other reforming national assessment systems.