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Accountability in education was implemented to improve poor learning outcomes by documenting and monitoring learning achievement results. In this process, external standardized achievement tests have played a central role, being the mechanism most frequently used to measure learning outcomes. However, several decades after its initial implementation, most students are still below learning standards, especially in developing countries. Additionally, several issues have been documented when using standardized achievement tests for accountability purposes. This study contributes to the discussion regarding why implementing accountability systems has not been enough to ensure that all students meet learning objectives. Particularly, this research explored technical, ethical, and political issues derived from implementing accountability systems in K12 in Colombia and Chile that incorporate standardized achievement tests to understand how the issues affect the quality of the accountability systems and limit their expected benefits. Specifically, this paper addressed the following questions: how do, if any, technical and political issues related to the use of standardized achievement tests affect the quality of the accountability systems? How do political decisions exacerbate technical issues and affect the quality of accountability systems? Can technical and political issues also be considered ethical? If so, how can all of them be overcome? This study built on theories and contributions about accountability in the education sector through the 2014 edition of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing developed by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), as well as a literature review regarding pros and cons of implementing an accountability system in the three dimensions analyzed: technical, political and ethical. A multiple case study with a theory-guided qualitative content analysis approach were also used; and the documentation of the current accountability systems in Chile and Colombia, and the most recent change due to political decisions were mainly reviewed to answer the research questions. Regarding the first one, seven issues that negatively affect the Colombian and Chilean accountability systems were identified; these limit their potential benefits. Issue 1: There is no clear connection between the intended inferences and how test results are reported. Issue 2: There are test reports with incomplete descriptions. Issue 3: Measurement errors are omitted when reporting some test results. Issue 4: The unit of intended inference for test results is not defined clearly in the regulatory documentation. Issue 5: There are omissions of support when describing the way in which test results should be used given the intended inferences, uses and implications. Issue 6: There is no clear connection between documentation, indicating how each one responds or builds on the others. Issue 7: Current standardized achievement tests measure the national curriculum partially, but it is not stated explicitly. Finally, the way in which these uses affect the quality of the accountability systems analyzed is described. For the second research question, some mixed evidence was found. For Colombia, the most recent political decision generated additional technical pressure, exacerbating technical issues, while Chile could have reduced the technical pressure. For the third research question, the political and technical issues identified can be considered ethical given the evidence analyzed, and they can be overcome by following the international standards in testing, as the accountability systems already declare. However, there is enough information for a better implementation of accountability systems in both Chile and Colombia, so a discussion about the implications for the field and practice is reported. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Writing Studies has flourished as a field in Latin America during the last two decades. Its development has been fostered by an exponential growth of college enrollments and processes of expansion and democratization of the educational offer in the region. The renewed attention received by higher education writing has fueled new research efforts and teaching initiatives that have rapidly spread across the region, especially in some countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Chile. As the field has accumulated a growing body of research, some disciplinary inquiry has started to appear, mostly sponsored by the "Iniciativas de Lectura y Escritura en la Educacion Superior" (ILEES) international group, which has showed the coexistence of two approaches, one informed by linguistics and another closer to educational perspectives. However, examinations on the nature of the epistemologies, and consequently, on the ideologies of literacy of this emerging disciplinary space has not yet been conducted. Such a research is important in order to consolidate and expand research and teaching efforts, but also to reflect on and improve the community's definitions, goals and identities, which is a much needed step to join the international ongoing conversation about writing. This research constitutes a socio-rhetorically informed attempt to understand what this novel disciplinary configuration means in terms of intellectual work through the study of the writing it actually produces, for example through citations, rather than from an external approach. It draws from data from previous studies that have shown that intellectual influence is diverse and citation patterns sometimes seem to bring together seemingly conflicting epistemologies. Given its socio-rhetorical approach, this research is primarily concerned with the activity writing scholars engage in. As Russell posits, the writing of a community can only be understood in terms of the community's activities. Similarly, the nature of the disciplinary grouping these scholars represent is also understood in terms of communal activity and problem definition, that is, in the ways in which their writing shows efforts to communally define an object of study. Methods blend tools from Rhetoric of Science and Discourse Analysis in order to examine a sample constituted by nine articles from the three leading countries of the region, and sampling was made through the ILEES Survey, which assured ecological representativeness, as the participants identified themselves as writing scholars. The three research questions that guided the inquiry are: (1) What are the main interests, research problems and knowledge claims that can be found in this sample of papers? (2) What are the epistemologies and ideologies of literacy in the sample and how they get to be represented in the texts? (3) Do these epistemologies correspond to the two disciplinary spaces (i.e. linguistics and education) described in previous studies? Attention was paid to intertextual dynamics (including rhetorical uses and citation patterns), introductions and definition of research problems, theoretical apparatuses, and knowledge claims. Micro analytical tools included appraisal, subjectivity markers, hedging, and metadiscourse markers, among other ad-hoc linguistic-level tools. These tools were used to provide textual evidence for the interpretation of the epistemologies and ideologies of literacy of the field represented in the sample. Results show very interesting and differential patterns in the discourse construction of knowledge for all the variables analyzed, including epistemic introductions and communally definition of problems, intertextuality, positive and negative evaluation of sources, among others. There are also various indexes of communal activity which allow us to think of this grouping as an emergent disciplinary community, which exhibits high levels of hybridization, both by resorting to previously known traditions (inheritance) or by bringing together all the resources that might seem to be useful (synthesis). As for the research questions, (1) there is a varied array of topics in this sample, but they can mostly be characterized as text descriptions, pedagogy practices, and writing practices. (2) There are two broad ideologies that can be characterized. One, more centered in the textual dimension, and other, more diffuse, which is constructed around the study of practices but still lacks disciplinary compaction. (3) These ideologies correlate to the main two groupings that were previously detected, namely linguistics-driven and educational-driven. Disciplinary clustering also highly correlates with the different discursive features of knowledge-making strategies, including the kinds of introductions constructed, the uses of intertextuality, and the nature of the claims. Additionally, there is evidence of jurisdictional disputes, both in the research articles and in the interviews. In sum, whereas the field is currently growing and in a clear path towards consolidation, it would benefit from a more sound communal definition of problems as well as a more cooperative, interdisciplinary stance. In order to gain a voice and join international conversations of writing, Latin American Writing Studies need to go beyond the replication of northern models and advance a local, decolonial perspective to writing studies, paying attention to the historical and material needs and constraints of the region as well as to its own theoretical strengths. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]