Abstract
Over the past few years Research Data Services (RDS), part of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), has led numerous large‐scale, longitudinal projects. Feedback to schools has been provided for all of these projects, and has been in the form of sets of tables and charts and electronic files illustrating pupil performance and progress in each school compared with national norms. This study sought to establish what differences the ongoing provision of feedback has made to the participating schools. The main thrust of the study was a statistical analysis of the most current National Pupil Dataset. Using this dataset, the overall impact on pupil performance in the participating schools of their participation in projects where feedback is used could be examined. In general, the findings presented in this paper suggest that school feedback does have an impact on key stage 2 performance.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge our colleagues in Research Data Services for the hard work and dedication that they put into making these large‐scale longitudinal projects run smoothly. We also wish to thank the DfES for granting access to the anonymized national dataset for this research. In particular, we thank Joanne Luke and her colleagues within Analytical Services, for compiling and providing the data.