A considerable body of recent literature describes the profound changes occurring as societies move from agricultural and industrial economies to a highly interconnected global knowledge economy (see, for example, Dertouzos, 1997; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). In the industrial age, the pace at which new knowledge evolved was relatively slow and a major role of schooling was to ensure that students mastered a well-defined set of knowledge and skills. However, with the advent of the 21st century, people are finding such abilities no longer sufficient when facing the everyday realities of the workplace. These realities demand making rapid decisions based on incomplete information when tackling novel situations, an aptitude for working through a plethora of information of varying levels of accuracy when tackling ill-defined problems, and the capacity to collaborate with a diverse team that may be distributed globally when endeavoring to accomplish personal and organizational goals (Peters, 1997).Citizens in the 21st century must also be prepared for lifelong learning because learning is no longer confined to the young or to institutional contexts (Young, 1999). Hence, there are strong arguments that the educational outcomes core to wellbeing in the knowledge economy are different from those in the industrial age and should encompass higher-order cognitive, affective, and social skills (Drucker, 1988). Given such a context, it is not surprising that a number of highprofile regional, national, and supra-national projects have been

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Questionnaires are a crucial part of international large-scale studies of educational achievement, such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) studies on mathematics, science, reading, computer and information literacy, and civic and citizenship education. Building on IEA's well-established technical standards, this chapter provides an overview of the purpose of this type of instrument, approaches to its development, and the evolving challenges in this area. While large-scale assessment studies have traditionally employed questionnaires to gather contextual information to explain variation in the respective outcome variables of interest, over time there has been a shift toward also collecting information and reports on students' attitudes, dispositions, or behaviors as outcome measures. More recently, development of alternative item formats and approaches have further increased the reliability, validity, and comparability within and across education systems. Approaches to questionnaire purpose and design can vary and instrument can be targeted to different groups and populations. Contextual information has to be collected across highly diverse educational systems creating issues regarding cross-national validity. The challenges of maximizing measurement invariance across highly diverse national contexts and the opportunities provided by a computer-based delivery may lead to future changes and improvements in the approach to questionnaire development.