Investigating the relationship between school-level accountability practices and science achievement

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between school-level accountability practices and science achievement of 15-year-olds, across four counties: Australia, Korea, Portugal, and the United States. We used PISA 2006 data, since 2006 is the only administration that has focused on science. School-level accountability practices are here defined as activities that: (a) provide school achievement data to external stakeholders, or (b) establish consequences according to the achievement results. Using linear regression analysis, we found that school-level accountability practices varied across these four countries, albeit not all pairs of countries were significantly different from each other in this regard. Using hierarchical linear modelling, we found that school-level accountability practices had a small effect on science achievement. Importantly, this effect was not independent of schools’ and students’ socio-economic status.

Identifying Good Teachers: Expert vs. Ordinary Knowledge

“…In recent years, a tremendous amount of research has studied standardized testing, focusing most frequently on issues of effectiveness, comprehensiveness, and validity. A principal concern here has been determining whether high-stakes testing policies by themselves lead to improvements in student achievement (e.g., Carnoy & Loeb, 2002;Gandara & Randall, 2015;Grissmer, Beekman, Ober, 2014;Hanushek & Raymond, 2005;Jacob, 2005;Judson, 2012;Nichols, Glass, & Berliner, 2006, 2012Supovitz, 2009). Additional work has examined the effects of high-stakes testing on other outcomes, such as deeper student learning (e.g., Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2015;Darling-Hammond, Wilhoit & Pittenger, 2014;Koretz, 2008;Marion & Leather, 2015), equity (e.g., Booher-Jennings, 2005;Kim & Sunderman, 2005;Nese, Tindal, Stevens, & Elliott, 2015), curricular breadth (e.g., Misco, Patterson, & Doppen, 2011), teacher anxiety (e.g., Amrein-Beardsley, 2009;Berryhill, Linney, & Fromewick, 2009), and teacher retention (e.g., Winters & Cowen, 2013), among others.…”