Educational measurement

The National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (INEP)) is the assessment arm of the Ministry of Education. It was created in 1990 to collect, process and analyze data on education in Brazil

The National Assessment of Basic Education and the Prova Brasil
The National Assessment of Basic Education (Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB)) and the Prova Brasil ("Test of Brazil") are two exams that make up the Evaluation System of Basic Education in Brazil.

The SAEB was the first national Brazilian initiative to measure the Brazilian educational system in depth. It was developed in the late 1980s and was first applied in 1990. In 1995, SAEB was restructured to allow for performance comparison from year to year. Since the first assessment, it has provided data on the quality of the educational systems of Brazil as a whole, geographic regions and the federal units (states and Federal Districts). The SAEB is carried out by INEP / Ministry of Education every two years. Tests on the Portuguese language and mathematics are taken by a sample of students enrolled in the 4th and 8th grades of elementary school and also the 3rd year of high school, in public and private schools located in both urban and rural areas. Results are aggregated for each state of Brazil and for Brazil as a whole.

The Prova Brasil assessment was established in 2005, due to a desire for more detail beyond that included in the SAEB. It expanded the range of results providing data not only for Brazil and Brazilian states, but also for each municipality and school participant. The Prova Brasil assesses all students in public urban education in the 4th and 8th grades of elementary school, public elementary education in state schools, municipal and federal levels of rural and urban schools that have at least 20 students enrolled in the grade assessed. The methodology of the two evaluations is the same and they have been used in combination since 2007, but students take one or the other and never both.

The results of the SAEB and Prova Brasil are distributed to the public of Brazil and anyone can view the results online.

Index of Basic Education Quality
In 2007, the Brazilian Ministry of Education implemented the Index of Basic Education Quality (Indice de Desenvolvimento da Educacao Basica (IDEB)) to monitor education progress in every school, municipality, state and region of Brazil. The IDEB builds on the SAEB and the Prova Brasil, combining the results of the Prova Brasil test with data on student enrollments and rates of repetition and graduation to generate an index of school performance for all but the smallest of Brazil's 175,000 primary and secondary schools, 5,000-plus municipal school systems, 26 state systems and the federal district systems. The results of IDEB studies are reported twice a year, and receive media coverage. Based upon the findings, the federal government establishes targets for improvement of primary and secondary education across schools.

In the initial years of IDEB's implementation, 2007-2009, it was found that over 70% of municipalities either reached or exceeded targets set by the Ministry of Education and INEP for early primary education.