Scientific production in Ecuadorian higher education on learning assessment: Bibliometric study, 2011-2021

This article presents a bibliometric study of the scientific production of learning assessments generated by Ecuadorianuniversities and their academic actors between 2011 and 2021, based on Google Scholar data. The decision was based on thenumerous problems associated with evaluative practice, the lack of bibliometric data on the subject, and its implications anddecisions in terms of educational improvement. The research sought to answer seven questions that guided the analysis. Anon-experimentalquantitativeapproachwasassumedandabibliographic,exploratory,descriptiveandlongitudinalstudywas applied. The bibliometricmethod and the descriptive-inferential statistics applied made it possible to measure andanalyze several bibliometric indicators: authors, their Ecuadorian institutional affiliation, titles, years, citations, sources, typesof publication (article or thesis) and keywords. The results show a scarce scientific production, highlighting some illustrativedata: of 237 publications analyzed, only 24 articles and 51 theses correspond to Ecuadorian higher education in its differentacademic actors, representing 32% and 68%, respectively. The average number of citations of only 3.5 in journals, beingmuch lowerin theses, denotes a low impact, while these are concentrated in only eight universities. On the other hand, morethan 90% of the citations were found in the Latindex database. These results will allow a deep analysis at the level of theuniversitycommunityinEcuador, allowingtorethinkactionsinthisregard