From left to right: Dr. Lale Khorramdel, Dr. Christian Christrup Kjeldsen, and Dr. Dirk Hastedt during the Q & A panel.

The LaNA national research coordinators discuss on the panel Perspectives on the Importance and Impact of LaNA.

In-person attendees from around the world.

The LaNA 2023 Linking Study Report is now available open-access via the IEA website. The international press release is also available here. 

Some key findings showed that: 

• The LaNA 2023 Linking Study successfully established new Basic International Benchmarks in mathematics and reading by linking LaNA to the well-known TIMSS and PIRLS scales. These new benchmarks extend the existing International Benchmarks from TIMSS and PIRLS, enabling the characterization of student performance at the lower end of the achievement scale.

• Seventy percent of students reached the new Basic International Benchmark of mathematics achievement.

• Fifty-five percent of students reached the new Basic International Benchmark of reading achievement.
• Achievement by gender in reading painted a similar picture to PIRLS 2021, where girls tended to perform better than boys. In mathematics, average achievement did not appear to be substantially different between gender groups in any of the six participating countries, a somewhat different finding to TIMSS 2023 where boys tended to have higher achievement than girls.

IEA’s LaNA, developed by the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, measures basic reading and mathematics skills at the primary school level, while also providing countries with insights across more advanced benchmark levels as measured in TIMSS and PIRLS. It provides country-level results in an international context.

It is a less complex and less demanding assessment than TIMSS and PIRLS, using multiple-choice items only, and is a pen-and-paper assessment. Consequently, it is easier to administer and less resource intensive.

LaNA is an off-cycle assessment, meaning countries have flexibility over when to implement the study. As such, countries can implement a study that fits their timeline, and have a more bespoke study by adapting context questionnaires for national contexts. With these benefits in mind, LaNA is also a vehicle for general national capacity-building in educational assessment, including for countries that haven’t participated in International Large-Scale Assessments before.

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