The interface between monitoring performance and how data are used: Striving to enhance the quality of education in schools

Abstract

The search for quality education within the context of the emerging global village has resulted in education systems across the world sharing many characteristics. Characteristics include an economic rationale for transforming education, an emphasis on standards, the need for valid and reliable indicators of performance as well as issues relating to accountability (Smith and Ngoma-Maema, 2003). Monitoring of and feedback on learner performance provide important information to politicians and the public alike, and in the 1990s, monitoring of education sys- tems became a major policy issue (Husén and Tuijnman, 1994). Here monitoring refers to the procedures for the collection of information about various aspects of the education system at national, regional and local levels (Husén and Tuijnman, 1994), with the main purpose of monitoring performance being to support learning or make judgements on achievement. South Africa faces many challenges related to its quality of education whilst recovering from the apartheid past (Howie, 2008). In an attempt to contribute to the improvement of education nationally, the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment (CEA) at the University of Pretoria, in collaboration with the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre (CEM), at the University of Durham in the UK, embarked on a research project in 2003. The National Research Foundation (NRF), a national funding body in South Africa, funded this project in order to investigate and develop appropriate monitoring systems via, at primary level, the South African Monitoring system for Primary schools project (SAMP); and for the secondary school component, the South African Secondary School Information System (SASSIS) (see Scherman, 2007 for more details). The aim of the monitoring systems was to provide information about the quality of education that learners receive, and more specifically the extent of academic gains made by intervening at the proper time and effectively in learner development. Additional funding was obtained by the South Africa Netherlands research Program on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD) to further develop the feedback component of the monitoring system. While a number of research questions are addressed as part of the broader research project, the research questions addressed in this chapter are: • How do participants articulate recommendations for the improvement of feedback and how is this related to data literacy? • How does information travel within the school environment and does this relate to changes in teaching and learning?