Formative Educational Evaluation for School Improvement

Scientific coordinator: Prof. Dina Guglielmi 

Project team: Ira Vannini, Marco Depolo, Greta Mazzetti, Andrea Ciani  

Departmental Research Centre: CRESPI - Center for Educatioanl Research on teachers as professionals. 

Project Duration (in months): 24 

Start Date: 29/01/2018  

End Date: 28/01/2020 

Status: concluded

Total Budget: 20.000 euro 

Project’s Topics: Instructional design, Schools’ organizational functioning, Management of educational processes, Formative evaluation 

Description: Nowadays different types of evaluation are carried out within and on schools, although it is not clear how the school staff (i.e., teachers and school principals) and educational institutions merge the obtained results and exploit their potential for further improvement. This project aims to combine procedures and outcomes of self- and hetero-evaluation with the levels of analysis they involve, in order to propose an integrated set of indicators and descriptors of "schools’ effective functioning" and the guidelines that allow to apply this product to educational institutions. The project stems from the interpretation of the concept of school effectiveness as formative educational evaluation, which conceives evaluation as an opportunity for improvement and growth for systems and subjects that are under evaluation; subjects that become leading figures of the evaluation through the analysis and interpretation of results and also taking responsibility in the organizational, educational and didactic re-planning activities. Accordingly, the goal is to carry out an effective formative educational evaluation able to influence the whole functioning of school, in order to link students' learning outcomes with processes of effective organizational, educational and didactic schools’ functioning.