An information service to act in binomial monitoring–improvement of educational performance in Portugal: Three Focus Group studies to explore the concept

Abstract

This paper presents a focus group discussion, which was carried out to collect information about the need, utility, and value that can be associated to the existence of an information service aimed to support the educational leaderships’ activities. Information services are information technology based services that perform functions, involving some form of information processing, that provides some value for a specific market, sector or for the overall society. In this paper, the focus is set on the education sector, more specifically on the creation of an information service to support leaderships in the monitoring and improvement of school activities performance. To check the perceptions of school actors about the existence of this kind of service and to identify what would add value to the director’s community, three focus groups discussions were held in three different country regions (Algarve, Lisbon, and Porto). The groups were designed to include a maximum of six school directors that tend to be representative of each region. Group’s discussions duration ranged from one hour and ten minutes to one hour and thirty minutes. To stimulate discussion, a roadmap with eleven questions was prepared. The group discussions were audio recorded, transcribed and analyzed. This paper details the design and preparation of the focus groups activities and presents a discussion on the data collected.