A STUDY ABOUT TEST PERFORMANCES OF RIO DE JANEIRO COUNTY STUDENTS IN 2012 AND 2011 BASED ON LONGITUDINAL DATA Leandro Lins Marino 1 , Denise Britz do Nascimento Silva 2 and Ruben Klein 1 1 Cesgranrio Foundation, Brazil 2 National School of Statistical Sciences, Brazil leandromarino@leandromarino.com.br The aim of this paper is to identify school, parents’ and students’ characteristics associated with educational achievement of students in the third, fourth, seventh and eighth years measured by a large assessment test. We analyze individual and school level factors that can affect the student achievement and, in addition, the work looks for factors influencing performance gains between two consecutive evaluation rounds. The analysis is conducted based on a two-level hierarchical linear model. The primary data source was an educational assessment procedure conducted by Rio de Janeiro City Council. The results confirm some findings already obtained in cross-sectional studies. Furthermore, these findings show a main effect associated with the fail/pass event in 3rd grade students and that not only low-performance students may fail the final exams and have been held back in school. INTRODUCTION The advent of large-scale educational assessments, in mid-twentieth century, made new studies emerge in the educational field. Among these studies, one of the most prominent and important is the Coleman Report (Bonamino & Franco, 1999), prepared based on information from a quantitative research on a sample of approximately six hundred and fifty thousand American students. The objective of this research was to investigate the association among variables linked to socio-economic background and student performance, in order to support public policies for school improvement. In Brazil, the introduction of a large-scale national educational assessment, known as Basic Education Evaluation System (SAEB), in 1995 led to great opportunities and advances for the investigation of factors that may be related to student achievement (Andrade & Laros, 2007; Ferrão et al., 2001). One example of the findings is presented on the SAEB 1999 Report (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira [INEP], 2000) that provides evidence regarding the impact that the education gap has on student performance. The availability of large-scale assessment results together with an information system about students, parents, teachers and schools characteristics opened new avenues in educational research. In particular, those related to the investigation of factors that could be associated with student performance. In particular, it is now possible to conduct longitudinal data analysis if a cohort of students takes part on periodic assessments across the years. The longitudinal analysis is usually based on a set of units (a panel) that are measured repeatedly at different occasions. MOTIVATION AND GOALS Although there are cases of longitudinal educational studies in Brazil, cross-sectional studies are much more common. One of the main reasons for that is a known deficiency in the available educational databases making hard to track a student trajectory along the years. In addition, a high number of State assessment systems do not perform longitudinal evaluations. Rio de Janeiro City Council carries out an evaluation designed to assess students in two consecutive periods. The evaluation, called Prova Rio (Prova means exam or test in Portuguese), is held annually and assesses public school students that are in the 3 rd , 4 th , 7 th or 8 th grades of Basic Education. This assessment is mandatory therefore all students of these grades are required to undertake the exams. This paper investigates which students’, parents’ and schools’ characteristics are associated with student performance measured by Prova Rio in 2011 and 2012. We analyze student features and characteristics of educational institutions that may influence the performance of children and young participants of Prova Rio in 2011 and 2012. The overall objective is to portray those factors associated with student proficiency and their educational institutions that were engaged on this IASE 2015 Satellite Paper – Refereed Marino, Britz do Nascimento & Klein In: M.A. Sorto (Ed.), Advances in statistics education: developments, experiences and assessments. Proceedings of the Satellite conference of the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), July 2015, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ©2015 ISI/IASE iase-web.org/Conference_Proceedings.php