Accountability and School Institutions in Cross-Country Perspective

Tasks

In a time of increasing importance of cognitive skills, the institutional frame for learning is key to the development of societies. School systems regularly use different forms of student assessments as accountability measures. This project will investigate how education systems work and whether reforms are successful in increasing the performance of their students.

Methods

The empirical model employs the country panel dimension to exploit reforms in assessment systems over time. By using country fixed effects, the analysis will account for cultural and economic differences across nations. Intertemporal changes in student performance for each country will be related to how the institutional structure of each country evolved.

Data Sources

For the research, the micro data of all six waves of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) since 2000 are linked in a panel dataset. In addition to the achievement data, PISA also provides a rich array of background information on each student and her school. Students are asked to provide information on personal characteristics and their family background. School principals provide information on the schools’ resource endowment and institutional settings. As PISA does not cover a range of important institutions, including exam and accountability systems, we will also refer to external sources. Thus, a primary task during the first year of the project is the development of a matrix of institutional features of the school systems for the participating countries covering a range of institutions for the period 2000-2015.

Results

Our research results suggest that some uses of student testing affect student learning, while others have no discernible impact. More specifically, expanding standardised testing with external comparisons, which are usually consequential, improves student achievement in math, science, and reading. By contrast, internal testing that simply informs or monitors progress and teacher inspectorates without external comparisons have little discernible effect on overall performance. Introducing standardised monitoring without external comparison has a positive effect in countries that were initially performing poorly, but not in high-performing countries. A similar pattern of greater impact in poorer performing systems emerges for the impact of school-based external comparisons.

Publications

Bergbauer, Annika Barbara, Ludger Wößmann and Eric A. Hanushek, "Testing", CESifo Working Paper No. 7168, 2018, IZA Discussion Paper 11683, 2018 and NBER Working Paper No. 24836, 2018

Bergbauer, Annika Barbara, Ludger Wößmann and Eric A. Hanushek, "Extern vergleichende Prüfungen verbessern die Schülerleistungen", ifo Schnelldienst 71 (20), 2018, 16-19

Bergbauer, Annika Barbara, Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Wößmann, "Testing with accountability improves student achievement", VOX CEPR Policy Portal, 2018