Mounting concerns about the levels and distributions of human capital, as well as how they are associated with outcomes for individuals and societies, have contributed to an increase in the number of national and international surveys. These surveys not only examine skills among school-age and adult populations, they also facilitate evaluation of the relationships among these skills and various background factors. At this juncture, the main ILSAs are making the transition to becoming fully digitally based assessments (DBAs). With the transition rapidly progressing, this is a propitious moment to consider the history of large-scale national and international assessments and to reflect on both what has contributed to their increased salience and growth, and how best to enhance their constructive impact on both policy and policy research in the future. We argue this can be done by utilizing a comprehensive, multidimensional framework that establishes a set of design criteria against which these assessments, present and future can be evaluated. The original framework was proposed more than 30 years ago by Messick (European Journal of Psychology of Education II 2:157–165, 1987) when all large-scale assessments were developed and delivered with paper-based instruments. Messick’s framework provided an organizational structure for how to think about and evaluate the potential utility of all large-scale assessments. After presenting a brief historical perspective on the development and growth of large-scale assessments, we review and extend Messick’s original framework. We then describe how the transition to DBAs can impact each of the framework’s three criteria. We also offer recommendations on how ILSAs’ development and innovations can best be deployed so that they are of greater utility to policy makers and other stakeholders worldwide.

人们对人力资本的水平和分布以及它们与个人和社会的成果之间的关系越来越关注，这导致了国家和国际调查数量的增加。这些调查不仅检查了学龄和成年人口的技能，而且还有助于评估这些技能与各种背景因素之间的关系。此时此刻，主要的ILSA正在向完全基于数字的评估（DBA）过渡。随着过渡的迅速发展，现在是考虑大型国家和国际评估的历史，并反思造成其显着性和增长的原因的好时机，以及将来如何最好地增强其对政策和政策研究的建设性影响。我们认为这可以通过利用全面的多维框架来完成，该框架建立一套设计标准，可以根据这些设计标准来评估当前和未来的评估。最初的框架是30年前由Messick提出的（欧洲教育心理学杂志II 2：157–165，1987年），当时所有大型评估都已开发并通过纸质工具进行了交付。梅西克的框架为如何思考和评估所有大规模评估的潜在效用提供了一个组织结构。在简要介绍了大规模评估的发展和增长的历史观点之后，我们回顾并扩展了梅西克的原始框架。然后，我们描述向DBA的过渡如何影响框架的三个标准。我们还提供有关如何最好地部署ILSA的开发和创新的建议，以使它们对全球的决策者和其他利益相关者有更大的帮助。