Abstract:

Quality development of student learning is a challenge for every education system. Evaluation in many countries is used to this end. It leads to the following question:

• What factors and student/ teacher activities do improve the level of student achievements (measured by external exams)?;

• Does external evaluation as a systematic and, as projected, longterm action – its procedures, ways of introduction, generated data, ways of the results dissemination, the level of achieveing requirements- influence the quality of education (especially student achievements)?

We would like to focus on the presentation of the process and results of external evaluation implementation in schools and institution in the whole Poland, in the framework of the pedagogical supervision reform. This process has a legal basis. The reform aims at creating a supervision system which genuinely supports schools’ development and makes running educational policy in Poland easier. This project carried out since 2009 and until 2015, 800 evaluators, 23600 principals of schools and other educational institutions, and 3000 teachers will be prepared for the evaluation process.

Considering the scale of the report, its systemic nature, the use of standardized research approach in the whole country, especially introduction of Internet platform, through which external evaluation is carried out, it is possible to draw conclusions valid for the whole country (now the platform contains responses from over 1 000 000 people: students, parents, teachers, school leaders).

Helen Simons stressed that evaluation is an invitation to development. Evaluation in Polish system of education was designed as developmental evaluation. From our perspective (we are co-authors of the system of the external evaluation) it is important to what degree evaluation meets the assumed goal, which is development of individual schools and the whole system.

The key issue is to combine the data from external evaluation and results of external exams. We would like to consider in our analysis such factor as:
• Activities and engagement of students in the classroom
• Attendance at classes
• Motivating students
• Teacher cooperation with parents
• Ways to motivate students
• Attractiveness of lessons
• Methods of work

Keywords:

External evaluation, development, student achievements, learning process.