ABSTRACT
In the high stakes milieu of end-of-secondary-schooling assessments that determine, in large part, students’ subsequent access to tertiary education and/or the workplace, the rhetoric of ‘school effectiveness and improvement’ has been reconstructed in terms of the market-place language of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Unfortunately, in many countries including Australia, the growing use of performance indicators advocated by policy makers in the form of students’ mean examination scores – aggregated at the school-level – tends to be narrowly focused on the publication of comparative ‘league table’-type rankings of between-school results rather than on locating and estimating the magnitudes of major sources of variation designed to inform potential within-school improvement strategies. This chapter describes a current project conducted in the state of Victoria (Australia) to engender within-school improvements in teaching, learning and student achievement via the provision of performance feedback data from the Year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) assessment program. With a key focus on improvement, the purpose of this project – known as the VCE Data Project – is to assist schools to monitor the effectiveness of their within-school teaching and learning programs for students on up to 53 subjects in a given year, and over time.
