The evaluation of school systems involves several aspects affecting both the methodological and the empirical component. In particular, the assessment of students’ competences through national (Invalsi) and international (PISA; TIMSS; PIRLS) standardized large-scale surveys has determined a relevant contribution to educational research. The results of these surveys should be integrated with information from the data coming from MIUR, Istat and Data Warehouse of Universities to study the educational biography for analysing drop-out problems. The opportunity to have available Big-data has encouraged the development of Educational Data mining methods.
Another theme that has been emphasized due to the Pandemic Covid-19 concerns the role of innovative teaching practice. The evaluation of good approaches should stimulate studies in this direction.