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CEM Centre gets an A-plus for measuring school performancePublished by the Communications and Development Department
15 June 2004
The Curriculum, Evaluation and Management (CEM) Centre at the University of Canterbury is helping New Zealand lead the world in measuring the value schools add to students’ learning, according to a visiting educationalist.
Professor Peter Tymms, who is the Director of the University of Durham’s CEM Centre, spent a day on the Canterbury campus last week after attending an Education Review Office conference in Wellington.
So what does the CEM Centre do? It measures what it calls "Value Added", to determine whether school students are keeping pace, lagging behind or performing better than expected.
“If you look at children as they progress through school they’re all making pretty good progress,” Professor Tymms says.
“But when you look within a school you’ll find that some children seem to make more progress than other children. If you compare the progress of two children with the same starting points then their relative progress is the value added.”
The value added can be zero, negative or positive and Professor Tymms believes it is at the heart of monitoring the effectiveness of schools.
“All a teacher or a school should be held accountable for is the progress the children make under their control. So it’s that information that can be used by schools for self evaluation and self improvement.
Professor Tymms says internationally there is a movement towards this type of monitoring.
“New Zealand is ahead of the game having the CEM centre here but in general New Zealand doesn’t have as many official tests coming down from the government as you would find in many other countries.”
Having said that Professor Tymms believes it’s a situation that should not necessarily change.
“If you can get away with it, it’s good not to because they can be a corrupting influence. Teachers can get paid by results, parents can take too much notice, teachers can teach to the test. But you do need some kind of accountability in there and the best thing I think is to have schools monitoring their own progress.”
For further information please contact: John MacDonald Tel: +64-3-364 2910
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