The retrospective look of the construction of the field of educational assessment enables the understanding of current trends in educational assessment as a constitutive element of educational policies, assuming increasingly transnational hues, either in the assessment of learning; institutional assessment and / or evaluation systems. In this light, this article focuses on the study of educational assessment, addressing its development as a field of academic knowledge and scientific, its historical and thematic trends prevailing in the light of the knowledge disseminated in Brazilian scientific journals considered of high impact – Cadernos de Pesquisa, Estudos em Avaliação Educacional, Ensaio: Avaliação e Políticas Públicas em Educação e Avaliação: Revista da Avaliação da Educação Superior. In methodological terms, it is a study of bibliographical works, which adopts the strategies of the researches called state of the art, and in this study are applied to the trajectory of the Brazilian educational evaluation, covering both the evaluation of basic education as higher education. Taking as analysis references fourteen studies on scientific production published in national journals, is drawn a timeline identifying the existence of four periods, in which the evaluation of Brazilian education is contextualized, assuming various hues and characteristics: from the technicality to the search theoretical (70s), the emphasis on the political dimension of educational evaluation (80s), the inclusion of educational evaluation at public agenda (90s), and the balance of scientific production on educational evaluation (2000s).

Educational evaluation, state of art, Brazilian scientific journals.