Value-added methodology has been used especially in the United States and England with the goal to derive equitable indicators of school performance (for application examples see Lissitz, 2005 and OECD, 2008). Despite on-going debates about its shortcomings and advantages, few researchers would dispute that value-added approaches are a relevant, state of the art development in educational research and policy-making. Besides technical challenges related to such issues as the stability of the value-added indicators over time, vertical scaling, and appropriate covariates and statistical method (Raudenbush & Willms, 1995; Goldstein & Spiegelhalter, 1996; Millman, 1997; Wainer, 2004), practitioners have had to deal with the difficulty of clearly and usefully reporting on value-added indicators to schools and parents (Schagen, 2003; DfES & Fischer Family Trust, no date). Few studies have empirically addressed the latter issue. Our study contributes to closing this gap by investigating how parents and school actors understand the meaning of value-added indicators, and what use teachers and headmasters would make of this information. In the context of a value-added pilot project implemented for the Chilean Education Ministry, school and parent reports that contained value-added indicators of school performance were field-tested. Specifically, we empirically tested the comprehension and utility of the newly reported information for parents, teachers and headmasters in public elementary and secondary schools. The study addressed the following research questions: (1) What is the level of comprehension by parents, teachers and directors of the value-added information provided by the reports? (2) How would they use the information should it be provided regularly? (3) What kinds of visual presentation and format facilitate comprehension? (4) What kind of scale (centered around zero or 100) facilitates comprehension? (5) Are there differences in comprehension depending on whether the report contains (a) information on simple learning progress from year 1 to year 2 as well as value-added indicators, or (b) only value-added indicators, without the learning progress? (6) Are there differences in comprehension between schools pertaining to the top versus bottom quartile regarding their students’ achievement?

We selected a sample of 12 urban schools of low or medium-low socio-economic status in order to test the reports in the most difficult environment where schools have few resources and parents have a low level of education. A total of 36 headmasters and teachers, as well as 24 parents, tested the school and parents reports that offered value-added indicators. These indicators were constructed based on longitudinal student achievement data available from schools participating in the Education Ministry´s pilot project. We conducted one-hour interviews in which a research assistant read the report to the interviewee section by section and asked questions at the end of each section. The interview protocol combined open-ended and close-ended questions. The open-ended questions allowed validating the closed-ended answers because they asked the respondents to restate in their own words and without reading the report what they understood regarding the report’s key contents and results.

We observed a good reaction to the value-added (VA) information. Especially teachers and headmasters praised the information as clear and useful. Within the context of the study the level of understanding and accuracy of interpretation of the VA information was reasonable. Comprehension was best when we used a synonym (“the school’s contribution to its students’ learning”) that participants could relate to more easily. Introducing the idea of learning progress (simple gain scores) before introducing VA also helps its comprehension, because it clarifies the longitudinal aspect of measurement first. Especially difficult to grasp was the idea that VA is relative to the performance of other schools. Based on our results we derive suggestions that are of interest to those designing or revising VA reporting mechanisms – an issue that is already of vital importance in some OECD countries, like U.K. and Netherlands, and being considered in others (see OECD, 2008).