Issue about culture, affect and standardized assesment

In this chapter we introduce some literature on the influence of culture on mathematics education, specifying the reasons why the cultural aspects are important in research on educational issues. We use this introduction to address the issue of the lack of studies regarding the cultural beliefs underlying national standardized assessment. A comparison among some features of standardized assessment in different European countries is carried out in order to highlight aspects that could be related to such beliefs, and that we hope will be better investigated in further studies