The Research On Value-added Evaluation Of Elementary And Secondary School Of The US And Britain

How to scientifically measure the performance of schools and teachers is a globaleducational evaluation problem.In the process of reforming the traditional evaluationsystem,the concept and system of value-added evaluation emerged at the rightmoment.It produced in1966,has gone through more than40years of developmenthistory up to now, both the theory and the practice had some development. But itsrelated research achievements are mainly concentrated in the US and Britain and otherwestern developed countries, and domestic research is very weak.Value-addedassessment thinks highly of the starting point,concerns about the process andemphasizes the development,it is of great importance for mitigating the viciouscompetition of the students,promoting the balanced development of schools andpromoting educational equity.If we want to put value-added assessment into Chineseeducational evaluation practice, we must have a profound understanding of its seriesissues. Therefore, to study the more mature value-added assessment practice of the USand Britain in depth is very necessary. The educational value-added evaluationprojects of Tennessee and Lancashire are the most successful value-added assessmentmodels at present. The Tennessee and Lancashire’s studies are similar in theoreticalbasis and methods, they are both based on the assumption that changes in students’test scores year after year can accurately reflect students’ academic achievement,which taking academic gain of students within a certain period of time as index, whilecontrolling the various factors that affect students’ academic achievement outside thecontrol of schools and teachers. They use multilevel regression analysis to evaluatethe effectiveness of teachers, schools and school systems in producing academicgrowth of students. But, they are different in the main purpose, the data and focus ofthe study. The Tennessee’s study mainly adopts standardized test scores of fivesubjects (mathematics, reading, language arts, social science and natural science) ofstudents in grades3through8, in order to meet the government and the public’s needsfor knowing the school accountability. Researches indicate that race, socioeconomicfactors, class size and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of studentacademic growth. Rather, teacher effectiveness is the major determinant of studentacademic progress; in addition, the effects of teachers are both additive andcumulative with little evidence of compensatory effects. However, the Lancashire’sstudy is mainly used for school self-evaluation, it not only employed the examinationresults of students in English, Mathematics and Science, but also joined the students’ attitude scale when investigated the variation trends of school effectiveness in bothvalue added and raw results across ten years. The results suggest that the continuousimprovement of school effectiveness is possible; there is a big difference according tothe results of the analysis of the raw scores and value-added scores, the improvementtrend of schools with a starting point score significantly below the expectations ismore obvious. Now, our country’s value-added evaluation is still in the experimentalstage, the project of school effectiveness evaluation in Hebei Province is the onlyofficial launch of value-added evaluation test. We still face some reality obstacles inthe research and application, such as data collection and data processing difficulties,insufficient statistical knowledge of the evaluators and researchers.