Abstract:

Our research considers the utility for the Romanian education system of the practical education tool called School Success Profile developed in the Social Work School in Chapel Hill, US by G. Bowen and J. Richman. The paper describes the process we went through to adapt the instrument and to validate it in Romania. The first stage of validation went through focus groups with children. Their content analysis indicated some difficulties of students to understand a few items and highlighted some cultural differences. The data collected from 2700 school-children allows further comparative analysis. It reveals that most of the factors of school success described by the instrument in the original version are acting in similar ways in Romania as in the US. This allows us to further analyze the chances of applying it in Romanian schools, taking into consideration the different traditions and practices of school administration and organization, in order to manage social factors of school success and apply appropriate evidence based intervention programs.

Keywords:

School success, evaluation of school performance, social dimensions, cross national validation.