avaliação diretamente relacionado ao Enem justifica-se, por um lado, pela própria possibilidade de ampliação do campo e, por outro, pela necessidade de aclarar e superar imprecisões conceituais que estariam limitando o alcance e a potencialidade de muitas avaliações semelhantes em curso.
Palavras-chave:Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio, Avaliação educacional, Política educacional, Avaliação em larga escala, Avaliação externa.
AbstractThe external and large scale evaluation has gained a central role in Brazil since the 1990s as the main instrument for decision-making in public educational policies. This trend, which led such assessment tests to be a part of the evaluation and educational quality's debate and literature itself, was materialized in several initiatives by the Federal Government of Brazil focused on evaluation, including especially the creation of the Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (Enem), object of this study. With the general objective of exposing and discussing the underlying Enem's evaluation Enem throughout its history, by pursuing its explicit and implicit objectives and purposes through qualitative documentary research, the analysis focused at the conceptual contents that could be captured in a range of studies and documents that compose the theoretical foundations of Enem. Assuming that, over the years, Enem has become a State policy, rather than a government policy, taking different positions depending on the educational policies associated with it, in the same way as it would undertake or reveal conceptions of evaluation or measurement of proficiencies with varied implications, we observed that Enem's scholastic assessment test functions have gained increased importance, with the exam being dissociated from its High School evaluation functions. In this way, the adequate conceptual approach related to Enem as an evaluation tool is justified by the possibility of expanding the field and, on the other hand, by the necessity to clarify and overcome conceptual inaccuracies that could be limiting the scope and potentialities of current similar studies.