Roberto Ricci is President of INVALSI Institute (Italy) since 2021. He has been working there since 2008 as responsible for national assessments and coordinator of the research area. After obtaining a PhD in statistical methodology for scientific research, he has been working for over twenty years in the field of measurement of learning through standardized tests. He is a member of the IEA’s General Assemby and Standing Committee and of the Governing Boards of OECD PISA and TALIS. In recent years, he has been involved in the national implementation of important evaluation tools in schools, such as the measurement of the school effect, the so-called added value, and the definition of the diachronic-longitudinal change of learning levels. Recently he has been engaged in the transition to computer-based testing (CBT) of the INVALSI assessments, also in an adaptive perspective at the individual level (multistage adaptive testing). He is a trainer at schools to foster a constructive dialogue on the issues of external evaluation. He is the author of many informative and technical-methodological articles on aspects related to large-scale standardized measurement.
Miguel Urquiola is Dean of Social Science and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He has chaired Columbia’s Department of Economics and its Committee on the Economics of Education. He is also a faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where he served as vice-dean. Outside Columbia, Urquiola is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and has held appointments at Cornell University, the World Bank, and the Bolivian Catholic University. He is a member of boards such as that of the the Social Science Research Council. Urquiola’s research is on the Economics of Education. It focuses on understanding how schools and universities compete and how educational markets differ from other markets economists study. He has written numerous journal articles on these issues and a book on why American universities excel at research: Markets, Minds, and Money. Urquiola’s teaching includes Ph.D. and M.A. classes. He currently teaches “Principles of Economics” to Columbia undergraduates.
Carmen Tovar is director of the National Institute of Educational Evaluation, of the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports, of the government of Spain.