WHAT IS SCHOOLS’ CONTRIBUTION IN STUDENTS‘ ACHIEVEMENTS – APPLICATIONS OF EXTERNAL EVALUATION IN POLAND

In 2009, the Pedagogical Supervision Regulation of the Minister of Education entered into force. The main objective of the new concept of the pedagogical supervision system is to collect and analyse information on school performance in areas determined by national requirements for schools and institutions, so as to strengthen their accountability, promote improvement and support the education policy.

External evaluation in Poland is created as a standardized research in the whole country. After 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 a million people: students, parents, teachers). From January 2010 till now (10 July 2013) 9212 evaluations took part.

The new model of supervision is based on the assumption that school can change society, and appropriate state actions can motivate schools (and other educational institutions) to take worthful educational initiatives. Therefore it was decided that the state will formulate requirements to the schools and other educational institutions. These requirements appoint a desired state of the educational system, showing its key aims and tasks, not comprising all the areas connected with various obligation of schools towards students and parents. They point out though strategic and priority directions connected with challenges of contemporary societies.

It leads to the following question: How respecting this requirements does influence students‘ achievements?
These considerations will be illustrated by the results of external evaluations carried out in Polish schools linked up with the results of external exams. We have analysed data gathered during evaluations in the school year 2012/2013 and students’ exam results in 2013. Our analysis focused on searching a correlation between students’ declarations on their own way of classroom work as well as observations of researchers during external evaluation, and students’ achievements (measured by external exams).

We have taken into consideration:
a) Students’ active involvement
b) Relating new pieces of knowledge to the ones previously acquired by students
c) Students’ self-regulation and self-reflection over their learning processes
d) Practical use of knowledge
e) Creating motivation for learning

In our analysis we used Educational Value Added (EVA). EVA is a characteristics of a school showing its contribution in students‘ achievements measured by external exams. Methodology of EVA relies on estimating expected results of a student on a final junior high school exams, based on their results of a test after primary school.