External school evaluation in Portugal: a glance at the impacts on curricular and pedagogical practices

Abstract

Answering demands for an increase of accountability in terms of public education, and intending to lead to an improvement of the quality of education (Conselho Nacional de Educação, 2010), external school evaluation has been taking place in the continental territory of Portugal since 2006. All the schools having been evaluated once, in what is known as the 1st cycle of external evaluation, and a 2nd cycle of external evaluation is underway since 2011. This paper presents a part of a national project funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, which aims at identifying and describing the impacts and effects of external school evaluation1. We frame external school evaluation as a contribution for the accountability of public service and for the improvement of practices and organizations (Bolívar, 2012). In particular, we will address impacts on pedagogical and curricular practices, inferred from the analysis of the «strengths» and «areas for improvement» identified in the external school evaluation reports of schools which have been evaluated in both cycles of external evaluation. In order to achieve that, we have carried out a category-based content analysis, using the N-vivo 10 software, over a research corpus comprising 40% of all the reports of schools evaluated twice, half of which correspond to the schools with the highest appraisals, and the remaining half to schools with the lowest appraisals. The results we have found when comparing the areas requiring improvement in the 1st cycle of evaluation, and the strengths found in the 2nd cycle of evaluation, suggest a positive impact of external school evaluation on teachers’ curricular and pedagogical practices.