Towards enriched standardized testing: Constructing relevant school-level indicators of learning progress in secondary education.

In the context of national tests, value-added estimates (VAE) are often used to indicate the extent to which schools foster their students’ learning progress. Although VAE are statistically valid, they 1) do not show how much progress schools make between measurement occasions; 2) reduce the quality of a school to a univariate performance measure; and 3) require complex modeling, making the results less transparent and usable for its purposes, i.e., school accountability, improvement and choice. Moreover, it is hard to identify a school’s true learning progress due to changes in school populations between measurement occasions, irregular student trajectories and the problem that short-lived administrative schools do not always coincide with real stable schools. The project aims are 1) to identify real, stable, secondary schools, 2) to develop a multivariate indicator of learning progress in these schools, taking into account student trajectory interferences such as inter-school mobility and tracking, and 3) to identify local school clusters providing complete secondary education trajectories and to investigate whether the role of a school within its local cluster is a suitable criterion to select schools for comparison in terms of learning progress. Student/school administrative data from the Flemish government (2020) and available data from the LISO-project (2013-2019) will be used to explore these research aims. The project provides input for the national standardized tests that will be organized in Flanders from 2023 onwards.

Keywords:students' inter-school mobility, educational and school effectiveness, learning progress, school performance indicatoren

Disciplines:Methodology of pedagogical and educational research, Mesolevel instructional sciences, Macrolevel instructional sciences