Influencing Educational Practice through Performance Indicators

ABSTRACT

School effectiveness research has provided us with the knowledge and techniques to produce fair performance indicators. But under what circumstances do performance indicators have the most influence? For ten years the A Level Information System (ALIS) has been feeding back quantitative summaries of educational performance to schools, department by department, in an effort to improve educational provision. During that time the feedback has regularly been accompanied by dissemination meetings at which the measures and methodology have been explained and discussed. This paper reports a survey and two experiments conducted within the framework of ALIS which were designed to gauge the relative importance of a range of factors on the impact of performance indicators on teachers from 70 schools and colleges. It compares the attitudes towards and the use of the system by: Heads of departments and members of the department; teachers from different curriculum areas; teachers with varying lengths of involvement with ALIS; teachers who had attended in‐service; and teachers of varying experience. The conclusions are linked to theories of change, cybernetics and a view of education which places researchers and other experts in a co‐investigator role with respect to teachers. The paper also argues that experimentation within school effectiveness research becomes a real possibility once credible monitoring systems have been established.