Measuring teaching quality: some key issues

Excerpt

In recent decades, numbers have become fundamental to education governance. Examination and tests results are used to categorise, compare, rank and position individuals, organisations, regions and countries. Although relatively new in education contexts, this form of governance has a long history in other areas where states employ systematic collection of demographic and economic data to monitor their populations (Ball 2015). Most often related to student performance, data have gained in importance as a means of summarising complex phenomena and dimensions across different locations and over time to identify and compare effective educational practices (cf. Hacking 1983) in ways that indicate ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ (Petterson et al. 2017). Embedded in performance management, these data are used to hold individuals, organisations and systems to account and as a basis for improvement (Verger et al. 2019; Prøitz et al. 2017). For example, the extensive research on measures to inform and improve teaching quality, actions and conditions that affect student outcomes as well as studies of teacher professionalisation. The articles in this issue address a number of topics related to the use of performance data, with particular reference to teaching quality. …