The Case of Evaluation and Accountability Provisions in Education as an Area for the Development of Policy Malleable System Level Indicators

Abstract

Educational indicator systems have evolved from descriptive statistics on educational finance, access and participation and attainment (in the sense of proportions of the population that have reached certain formal attainment levels) to more complex sets of measures that contain test based and survey based data. The most prominent conceptual framework is the input- process- output- context framework, in which process indicators may be seen regarded upon as the most ambitious category. Process indicators represent policy malleable conditions at classroom, school and national system level. When countries would have comparable process indicators as well as comparable outcome indicators, like the results from PISA and TIMSS, they could start using this information to benchmark the effectiveness of relevant policy measures. In this article indicators on evaluation and accountability provisions at national level, are examined, as an example of policy malleable system level indicators. The emphasis is on indicator development; and for this purpose the main body of the paper attempts to specify an elaborate conceptual framework on educational evaluation, monitoring and assessment. A particular emphasis is given to hypotheses about the way evaluation, feedback and rewarding (actually applying rewards or sanctions) could function as levers of educational performance. Major explanatory mechanisms, that could be seen as background principles of educational policies are incentive based administrative control, market mechanisms and “choice”, and organizational learning. It is concluded that the empirical evidence on any of these three mechanisms is relatively meager, but that increased achievement press might be a common intermediary causal factor. Next an attempt is made to provide an encompassing descriptive framework on evaluation and accountability procedures. The basic lay-out of this framework is determined by the question: Who evaluates what, for which purposes or intended use, by means of which methods. It leads to distinguishing evaluation actors or providers, evaluation objects at various levels of the system, specific functions of evaluation, monitoring and assessment forms and a set of core methodological approaches, based on different kind of data (test data, statistics and review and research based data). Part of this framework is used to specify three indicator areas; diversity of provisions, type of accountability orientation and institutional infrastructure. These indicators could basically lead up to qualitative country profiles. If adequate statistical information were available it would be very interesting to have quantitative information about the scope (number of units, schools, teacher, students, involved) and intensity (in terms of the financial investments and expenditure). Such statistical information is not readily available in most countries, however. The matter seems to be sufficiently relevant to improve national statistics in this domain, and this would also apply to regional, statelevel information in federal states, in case evaluation and accountability policies and provisions differ between states.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.