Session Information
01 SES 08 C, School Improvement Research
Paper Session
Contribution
Objectives and purposes
With the establishment of performance-based accountability (PBA) policies that combine various types of data about educational quality to form a basis for school improvement (Verger et al., 2019), the demand for evidence-based practices in education has increased significantly. In Switzerland, a competency-based curriculum for primary schools in the German-speaking cantons was introduced in 2018–19 along with standardised tests that provide data on educational quality for cantonal authorities. At the same time, the external evaluation of schools and legal regulations remain strong policy instruments. One example is the regulation of formative assessment in a canton in Central Switzerland, Schwyz. This paper examines how school actors respond to new expectations by applying various data sources and aligning their practices with new legal requirements. Particular attention is directed towards how teacher teams negotiate and make sense of the various data sources to make decisions about classroom practices to improve student learning.
Theoretical perspectives
This paper draws on two theoretical perspectives. The governance perspective emphasises the interplay of various policy instruments, routines and rules in the school system or school organisation, while the enactment perspective helps identify priorities and conditions for local school actors to respond to new governing expectations to improve classroom practices in specific socio-institutional settings (Ball, 2011; Braun et al., 2011). We also explore how the various data sources can be used to develop practices, such as bounded decision-making, leading to formal and informal learning across teacher teams in the school organisation (Cain et al., 2019).
Method
The study is conducted in two schools in Switzerland and it has a qualitative design that includes interviews with key persons, document analysis and ethnographically inspired observations of various meetings focusing on development work. Data sources include transcripts from the conducted interviews, field notes from the observations and key documents, such as school development plans and material developed by the teacher teams. The combination of these data sources will help to understand the situational contexts and the larger school context and it allows an approach that is not based only on self-reported data.
Expected Outcomes
Expected Findings Policy is often premised on the idea that access to evidence-based knowledge will lead to the use of this knowledge (e.g. Schildkamp et al., 2017). Preliminary findings of this paper suggest that teachers’ use of data sources is often implicit as teachers integrate the various sources (i.e. student performance data, experience, research evidence, contextual information about students) in their decision-making. However, new regulations regarding assessment practices seem to shape teachers’ practices in somewhat instrumental ways. Scientific significance The paper shows how school actors respond to new expectations, particularly in terms of how they negotiate and make sense of data sources to improve classroom practices. Through the chosen design and methodological approaches, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between performance-oriented and regulatory policy instruments and provides implications for teachers’ professionalism.
References
Ball, S. J., Maguire, M. & Braun, A. (2011). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. Routledge. Braun, A., Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Hoskins, K. (2011). Taking context seriously: Towards explaining policy enactments in the secondary school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), 585–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.601555 Cain, T., Brindley, S., Brown, C., Jones, G., & Riga, F. (2019). Bounded decision-making, teachers’ reflection and organisational learning: How research can inform teachers and teaching. British Educational Research Journal, 45(5), 1072–1087. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3551 Schildkamp, K., Poortman, C., Luyten, H., & Ebbeler, J. (2017). Factors promoting and hindering data-based decision making in schools. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 28(2), 242–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2016.1256901 Verger, A., Fontdevila, C., & Parcerisa, L. (2019). Reforming governance through policy instruments: How and to what extent standards, tests and accountability in education spread worldwide. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(2), 248–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1569882
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