Evaluating School Improvement Efforts – Pupils as Silent Result Suppliers, or Audible Improvement Resources?
Abstract
This article contributes to a perspective of school development, where pupils’ experiences of the teaching they encounter are regarded as a result of improvement work. In a three-year research collaboration with four nine-year compulsory schools in a large Swedish municipality, researchers have continuously conducted group interviews with different actors, collected relevant documentation and reported their preliminary analyses to the schools. In the light of previous research, the results show that the development areas that have been in focus in the schools have in some cases had an impact on the teaching. However, no homogenous change is evident. Rather, the variation between classrooms, teachers and subjects is great, especially if the pupils’ perspectives are taken into consideration. The pupils’ experiences and voices on how the improvement work materialises in the classroom contribute to explaining the connections, or lack of them, between the school and classroom levels.
https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.6.3
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