I was very impressed by the 2016 ICFES Seminar, to which I was delighted to be invited as a speaker. The quality of sessions and workshops offered lived up to the highest international standards, and the organization around it was absolutely flawless. However, what I found most noteworthy about this event was yet another fact: on very few occasions before have I perceived a research congress to be this valuable to policymakers and to an audience extending beyond academics. The conspicuous attendance by education experts, professionals and public agency representatives was probably the best confirmation to my impression. Overall the ICFES congess revealed itself as a highly valuable opportunity for the exchange of knowledge and academic research on education, as well as for personal networking. I am very much looking forward to attending again in years to come.

The ICFES seminar is an excellent forum for disseminating academic research to a practitioner audience. Education professionals in Columbia are eager to learn new research methodologies and adopt novel education practices, and it was a pleasure to present to and interact with an audience like this.

I am really in favor of similar events, I think it’s really important to bridge the gap between science and actual policies. It’s very important to bring academics to teachers and to bring teachers to academics, so that we can learn each other language and we can show what we do as academics to teachers and teachers can also debate about what they are doing.

I think we can really improve science and we can improve practices and this fits with the evidence based policy and evidence based education. We try to see some policies and practices that work and if they work we try to expand them to a larger scale. This kind of seminars and this kind of conferences are definitely a very good thing to foster and for Colombia is very good because in your country there’s so many data you have such a good tracking system of students, many papers are making use of that so i guess this kind of seminars and events are even improving this kind of knowledge-based that we can have.

I think that it’s really nice to see teachers and interact principals, policy makers and researchers altogether because we don’t know or talk to each other very much. I think both the researchers and the teachers don’t really know what is happening in the school. Researchers don’t talk to the teachers and principals and they don’t really understand what the researchers are trying to do. So I think this is a very good idea.

I think it is a very important concept because we really need to get the researchers to the population practitioners, and in some sense we also need to get feedback from them. We can do experiments, but ultimately when we talk about scaling policies you have to interact with teachers and you need to understand from them as well what they think would work, what would they implement and so on. I was delight to have the opportunity to do that.

I’m just so impressed to see a conference like this. A conference that has over a thousand attendees that has teachers, principals, educators. I would like to congratulate Icfes for putting together such a fantastic program. It’s also really nice that you get so many world leading experts, I mean to come, and the fact that there is interest and appetite is wonderful. I think Colombia has been one of the leading countries in terms of doing high quality research.

I’ve had a very good time I am just very impressed to see the amount of enthusiasm and excitement for people to learn about research and learn about how that might affect their practice and affect policies in Colombia. Congrats to Icfes and congrats to everybody for putting together such a nice program.

This kind of Seminars are wonderful. Typically, researchers talk to other researchers, probably teachers only talk to other teachers and policy makers only talk to other policy makers. So, any time you can bring those groups together to talk about the things that they care about, how we help children learn more, how we help them to become motivated and engage in their learning, I think is very important, so it’s very honor to me ask to come and be part of it.

I was invited to give one of the keynote lectures at the ICFES seminar and it was a great experience. The seminar was attended by many people (hundreds) with strong interests in improving education, both in Colombia and other countries. The seminar brought together practitioners and researchers. Researchers presented papers on the determinants of cognitive and noncognitive achievement in education contexts more broadly, from pre-K to college. I received valuable feedback on my own research, I learned many things from listening to the research seminars, and I enjoyed my first visit to Bogota.

I really enjoyed my experience as a speaker at your conference and was energised by the intellectual engagement of all who attended. It was my first time in Columbia and it really was an eye opener for me. I hope to visit again.

I was deeply impressed with all aspects of my ICFES experience. The ICFES staff really went out of their way to make sure my visit was smooth, comfortable, and fun. The conference itself featured high-quality work and broadened my perspective on Latin American educational systems and research. I’m really glad I went and would encourage other invited researchers to gratefully accept the opportunity to visit Colombia and learn about the wonderful work at ICFES and beyond.