Education can be understood as a space for transformation that seeks equality and the implementation of democracy. Traditionally, the assessment of academic performance has focused on the results obtained by students in the subjects taken at different academic levels. These results have been used for various purposes: to order countries according to performance, to identify areas to be strengthened, or to develop education policies. In recent years, however, achievement assessments have begun to incorporate the evaluation of other individual and contextual factors that have shown relations between these factors and the students’ academic performance.

The present symposium brings together several works that assess the possible impact of variables of different nature (individual, group, social and contextual) on the performance of children and adolescents. The symposium proposes an approach to the student beyond the performance of the academic tasks themselves. To this end, different studies will be reviewed where, through different methodologies, different groups of students and different assessments, elements that may be relevant for the present and future use of educational resources are proposed. Similarities and differences between the results presented in the different studies will be discussed and global conclusions will be formulated that integrate the reflections of each study.

Professor in the area of Methodology of Behavioural Sciences at the University of Loyola Andalusian. She has a degree in Psychology from the University of Granada, and a PhD in Psychology from the same University where she also completed an official master's degree in Psychology of Social Intervention. During her PhD, she researched the usefulness of mixed designs to understand the origin of bias in evaluation.

From 2013 to 2015 she worked in the Department of Cross-cultural Psychology at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) where she developed a postdoctoral project focused on the use of quantitative and qualitative procedures for bias assessment in evaluation instruments used in international projects. Later, she worked for a few months at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a technical analyst in the PISA project for schools.

Since 2016 she has been working at University of Loyola Seville, where she teaches in the area of behavioural sciences methodology, holds management positions on the university's ethics committee and PhD school, and researches methodological aspects related to the assessment of academic performance and associated factors. She also collaborates with other research groups on projects.