The Aprender tests are a national assessment program that measures student knowledge at different educational levels. This initiative was launched by the Ministry of Education in 2016 and is conducted annually, alternating between primary and secondary levels. The main areas assessed are mathematics and language arts, but questions about the students' socioeconomic context are also included.
Every year, when the tests are administered or results are released, controversies and discussions arise, whether about their purpose and/or methodology, or their results. At Infodash we set out to process and visualize all available Aprender test results with the goal of contributing to the education debate. The dashboard consists of 5 tabs that allow you to delve into a multitude of variables and results, with the ability to filter by test type and year, jurisdiction, socioeconomic level, school type (private-public, urban-rural), among other options.
For example, at first glance, in the "Results" tab, the gap between students achieving a satisfactory level in Language Arts (71.5% in the 2022 Aprender tests) versus Mathematics (37.9%) stands out. If you navigate to the "Gap Between Levels" tab, you can observe that this gap is particularly high in secondary school but not of such magnitude in primary school. In other words, between primary and secondary levels there is a deterioration in student performance, but it is much more noticeable in mathematics than in language arts. Additionally, the dashboard shows that the decline in student performance between primary and secondary is evident regardless of school type (public-private, urban-rural).
In the "Performance Analysis" tab, you can also observe, regardless of the test year, that student performance correlates positively with socioeconomic level, parents' education level, and peer relationships. On the other hand, on average, female students tend to achieve better results in language arts but worse in mathematics, although the difference does not appear to be substantial.
