In Italy, as of 2018, the national standardized assessment of learning has changed the procedures and methods used to evaluate learning in a secondary school. The move from a paper-and-pencil testing system to a computer-based administration system has allowed National Institute for the Evaluation of the School System (INVALSI, a public research Institute in Italy) to create item banks for lower and upper secondary schools. In order to work towards more explicit and transparent results in the assessment process, a qualitative description of proficiency levels has been developed for individual student feedback.

In order to better understand these descriptions, INVALSI has developed a toolkit that aims to summarise the whole process of reading comprehension assessment through ad hoc materials. The main reason for the development of this toolkit is that the tests that make up the item bank must necessarily remain secret over time, even if they have been partially renewed and expanded over the years. The INVALSI item banks are still young, so INVALSI plans to release items from these item banks in the future. However, a second important reason for creating these tools is the potential usefulness for the school to better understand the content of the standardised test and the results that emerge at class level. The toolkit contains a number of examples of questions that relate to the text and also to the task description, based on a qualitative study of the characteristics of the texts and questions contained in the item banks in order to identify 'equivalent' examples of these materials. The aim of these tools is to provide a more immediate understanding of the types of topics and some of the features of these topics that are included in the different descriptive levels of competence and, above all, to see concretely what the different passages in the descriptions of the levels themselves refer to. In addition, the toolkit contains a summary of the tasks measured by the standardised test, linked to the national indications, and an exemplary version of the test on the platform used for the computer-based assessment.

The whole process was developed by the INVALSI research group involved in the item development process for the reading comprehension test, using a method of iteration and feedback with experienced school teachers, external experts in reading comprehension test development and university linguists in the realisation of the materials, until a general agreement was reached. The review of all these materials by a group of external experts provided the necessary validation of the proposed materials. This combination of different approaches and expertise is intended to provide the final product with the reliable scientific rigour necessary for the use of these materials in both research and teaching.

In conclusion, the development of the toolkit is part of a process of bringing national assessment of learning closer to schools and pupils themselves. Constructing a national assessment system that not only develops measurement instruments, but also accompanies these instruments with materials that allow the information from test results to be translated into useful elements in the school learning process, both for teachers and students, is one of the main goals that has always been present in the research groups that have been involved in the development of standardised assessment tests in my research team over the years.

Keywords: Standardized assessment, proficiency levels, toolkit, reading comprehension, education.