From Curricular Justice To Educational Improvement: The Role Of School Self-Evaluation In Curriculum Development

Author(s):

Marta Sampaio(presenting / submitting)Leite Carlinda

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

11. Educational Improvement and Quality Assurance

Format:

Paper

Session Information

11 SES 05 B, External and Internal Evaluation of Educational Effectiveness

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

11:00-12:30

Room:

B232A/B Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Andra Fernate

Contribution

Since 2006, Portuguese schools are subject of an external evaluation process performed under the responsibility of the General Inspection of Education and Science (GIES). This process follows a framework that is structured around three areas: (1) results (2) educational service provision, and (3) leadership and management. The result of schools external evaluation (SEE) is communicated to schools through a report that justify the classifications of each area and sets out the main strengths and aspects to improve.

The SEE process is justified by the aim of promoting the progress of students’ learning and outcomes, identifying schools’ strengths and areas needing to be improved. Thus, is important to understand if schools (and their educational agents) are creating conditions for students learning (Young, 2008) and if these are provided in the same way for all students (Leite, 2003).

It is also important to know if these practices are related to the evaluation processes experienced by schools. According to Afonso (2009), many of the innovations at curriculum level are directly related to external accountability measures. In other words, and as mentioned in the OECD report (Kärkkäinen, 2012:29), it must be remembered that «(...) schools can be affected by the results of national examinations or by external inspection - "the mandated formal process of external evaluation with the aim of holding schools accountable"».

Even though there is legislation establishing schools’ the evaluation system since 2002, in Portugal (Law No. 31/2002), encouraging the development of self-evaluation (SE) processes, it was only with the institutionalization of SEE processes (in 2006) that SE began to have expression.

However, what happened in Portugal is not very different from what happened in other countries, due to movement of decentralization and autonomy of educational institutions, as well as to the comparison of students’ final results, between schools. As stated in the recent OECD report (2013: 214): «in recent years, many schools have become more autonomous and decentralised organizations; also they have become more accountable to students, parents and the public at large For Their outcomes. The results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) suggest that when autonomy and accountability are intelligently combined, they tend to be associated with better student performance». It was already with this intention that, in Portugal, in the middle 90’s, the ETPP (Educational Territories of Priority Intervention) were created, as an expression of scholar autonomy, directly related to accountability processes for schools. The main purpose was for schools to locally find ways to solve problems related to social inequality, school dropout and academic failure (Barbieri, 2003; Leite, Fernandes & Silva, 2013). Moreover, associated with this view, emerges the idea that school SE can be a strong support for promoting the desired educational improvement (Bolivar, 2013).

It is in this context that this communication problematic lies. The main goal is to study SE processes developed by primary and secondary education schools, aiming to produce knowledge about effects generated in the promotion of curricular justice and educational improvement. In our perspective, it is important to understand the conditions that contribute to the inclusion of distinct social groups, in a curricular and social justice perspective (Connell, 1995; Santomé, 2013), which are essential for the construction of democratic schools (Apple & Beane, 1995). In other words, it is important to know what are the influence of school evaluation policies (Macbeath, 2006) in the development of a curriculum that promotes the principle of a successful school with all and for all (Leite, 2002; Freire, 2007; Stoer & Magalhães, 2009).

Method

We believe that the SEE reports have an important role in the (re)construction of schools (Veloso, Abrantes & Carneiro, 2012) and that they contain relevant material information to improve our knowledge about schools’ reality. Thus, in order to achieve the above mentioned objective, SEE reports from 30 ETPP schools were analyzed (from a total of 144 schools evaluated in 2012/2013). The study developed is of interpretative nature, based on a qualitative analysis (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003; Braun & Clarke, 2013) – content analysis – of discourses expressed in these reports. The content analysis (Bardin, 2007; Krippendorf 2003) was performed using the NVivo (v. 10) software, having as coding units sentences/clauses, although, in some circumstances, full paragraphs were also considered as units. Nevertheless, in all cases, it was the unit sense that guided the coding procedure. Moreover, the rule of mutual exclusiveness of the categories, in the coding process, was not followed (L’Écuyer, 1990). To perform this analysis, the following categories were considered: (1) self-assessment and internal monitoring of the curriculum, (2) pedagogical practices/teaching practices, (3) curricular innovations. This procedure allowed us to identify some effects of SE at a curricular level, and its impact on schools’ organization and curricular development.

Expected Outcomes

Data analysis allows us to state that schools are influenced by SEE, both at organizational and curricular levels. One of the main effects of SEE is seen in the implementation of increasingly large and sustained SE processes, involving a large number of educational agents/educators. Also, the data allows us to infer that schools are more aware of the importance of SE, and this is often identified as an opportunity for improvement. We can conclude that SEE an SE processes have been encouraging schools to develop means and tools enabling them to improve their educational activities. Internal monitoring of the curriculum, practices of pedagogical differentiation, curricular articulation and sequentiality, and teachers’ collaborative work are referred, in this process, as essential to the proper functioning of schools and to their improvement. At the same time, these procedures and these effects are associated with leaders’ performance in management and administration, that have an important role in schools’ functioning and organizational structure. In sum, the data suggests that SEE is generating changes at organizational, pedagogical and curricular level. The curriculum management practiced by the schools and the actions to enrich the curriculum seem to be directly related to the promotion students’ new learning. Nonetheless, in some schools, this situation has not culminated in an institutionalized practice. In fact, the focus of the SEE and SE processes is still on the evolution of educational attainment, which might be explained by the trends that been shaping European schools, leading them to a larger external and centralized control of the results. Therefore, it seems necessary to investigate if this centrality of school results could constitute an obstacle to the creation of favorable conditions for the implementation of curricular innovations with a positive impact on the quality of the training offered to, and experienced by, students.

References

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Author Information

Marta Sampaio (presenting / submitting)

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences - University of Porto, Portugal

Leite Carlinda