International assessments reveal that student achievement in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is similar to other Western Balkan economies but large shares of students continue to leave school without mastering basic competences. The country also has limited data on teaching and learning, making it difficult to take evidence-informed policy decisions. These challenges are hindered by capacity and resource constraints that prevent several competent education authorities from developing strategic plans and implementing education reforms. This chapter reviews some of the contextual features of education in BiH and highlights how evaluation and assessment can help achieve higher learning standards for all students.

Education systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) have taken steps to introduce new competence-based curricula. However, assessment policies and practices in many of the competent education authorities covered by this review do not yet reflect the types of instructional practices that support student learning. For example, teachers often lack resources and support to implement formative assessments in their classrooms and the use of standardised assessment in the country is very limited. This chapter sets out recommendations for how education authorities can address these challenges and use student assessment as a tool for helping all young people to develop core competences.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), competent education authorities are beginning to promote the more student-centred approaches to instruction that are increasingly common across OECD countries and can support students in developing their core competences. However, teaching practice has been slow to change, largely because there is a lack of supports and incentives to encourage the adoption of these new approaches. This chapter proposes how BiH could make use of new teacher appraisal procedures and learning opportunities to help transform teaching practices by reinforcing clear expectations, establishing feedback loops that reward performance, and supporting teachers’ initial preparation and their continuous improvement.

Several competent education authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have been moving away from a compliance-oriented approach to school quality assurance towards procedures that emphasise the development of learning and teaching practices. Despite these efforts, most competent education authorities covered by this review do not conduct external evaluations or self-evaluations of schools. Many also lack consistent standards or implementation protocols for evaluating school performance, which makes it difficult to form reliable judgements and determine where and how best to provide schools with support. This chapter puts forward a set of practical recommendations that aim to accelerate the development of improvement-oriented evaluation practices in BiH school systems, while making the most of limited resources and capacity

Education stakeholders in Bosnia and Herzegovina have taken steps to establish some of the basic building blocks needed to monitor and evaluate education policy and guide system improvements. However, major gaps in system evaluation frameworks remain, namely the availability of comparable data on learning outcomes, which is lacking in most jurisdictions. This chapter presents possible pathways that competent education authorities and other BiH actors could take to strengthen collaboration and co-ordination in the education sector, as well as increase the use of evidence for planning and policy development.