La Verifica come Elemento di Sistema

European Commissioner Janez Potocnik has affirmed that "for Europe and European industry to build sustainable leadership is to fully exploit the knowledge triangle: the creation, transmission and use of knowledge, through research, education and training and innovation."; Thus, education is necessarily one of the main ways for nurturing individuals capable of exploiting the knowledge triangle by interacting on a common ground of knowledge and skills. However, providing the students with common contents is not sufficient if such contents are not organized so that each student is presented with tasks difficult enough to be challenging but easy enough to be reachable. Thus, effective and replicable teaching activities require reliable data on student knowledge and skills, teacher expertise, and school organization and climate. Such information may only be gathered through an accountability system that provides data to a plurality of stake-holders such as: - families and students, who are interested in the actual level of knowledge and competences achieved by each student in a regional, national, and international perspective; - schools and other educational institutions, which are interested in reciprocal comparisons of the value added to the knowledge and skills of the students; - the university system, which is interested in knowing the actual level of knowledge and skills possessed by the students who are entering a university career; - the job market, which is interested in reducing on-site formation costs and better and better matching individual skills with the occupied positions. The Lombardia experiment, carried out along three years, provides an example of the use of testing for creating an accountability system based on measuring the value added by the school to student knowledge and skills. The project makes use of statistical methodologies such as Rasch analysis and Growth models to build reliable and valid measures of student achievement. The results of the project indicate possible uses of the data in terms of system and school management, issues related to data analysis and methodological development of the system, and possibilities for further research.

VIDONI Daniele;  SCAGLIOSO Cosimo; 

2006-10-23

IRER - Istituto Regionale di Ricerca della Lombardia

JRC33811