It’s podcast time! 🎧 Grab your headphones for a new BT Talks episode. Today we’re talking about education. Joining Andi Moisescu, our host, is a guest to match — Dragoș Iliescu. Dragoș’s passion for education led him to develop Romania’s only standardized testing system, Brio.

Curious how Brio can help everyone involved in education? Hit play. We think it’s worth it.

A few takeaways from this episode:

• Just like in business, in education you can’t manage what you don’t measure — and you need to measure often enough to track progress.

• Psychological testing and educational testing are both underpinned by psychometrics — the science of measuring intangible things, such as depression or mathematical competence.

• In Romania, psychometrics in educational testing hasn’t really taken root. We’re roughly 60 years behind what’s being done in the West.

• Epidemiological mental health studies that look at anxiety show that 30% of the school population suffers from test anxiety (...), which negatively affects performance. One way to address this is to put children in exam situations more often.

• Romania’s only standardized testing system, Brio, currently covers mathematics and Romanian language and literature for grades 1–7.

• The Brio report is very detailed and gives parents a clear picture of a child’s knowledge and how they can move from one performance band to another. “If you’re at the 95th percentile of the school population, the effort needed to gain another point is so great that it might not be worth focusing there. But if you’re at 20% somewhere else, that’s an area you can improve with relatively little effort.”

• From brand creation with Brandient to item validation by Gazeta Matematică, only specialists have been involved in building the testing system.

• The benefits of testing are clear for everyone involved in education:

Students — Brio helps students monitor their progress, understand what they know well and what they don’t yet master, and compare themselves with peers of the same grade and age. What’s more, if they consistently achieve good test scores, they build self-confidence.

Parents — Brio gives parents a report showing the tested child’s performance level and how long it would take to improve that level, if needed.

Teachers — Statistics show the average middle school teacher spends around 14 hours a week on assessment. With Brio, each child receives a different test of equivalent difficulty, which makes the testing process easier.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to BT Talks on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or Spotify. We’ll be back soon with new episodes for you!