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Without  attempting  a  thorough  examination,  this  text  makes  a  retrospective about the uses of institutional evaluation in basic education in Brazil, since the mid-1990s. We noticed that evaluation initiatives are not only in elementary and secondary schools, whether in singulars schools or public systems, but also in early childhood education. In recent years, these last ones have been  the object of action of the Ministry of Education and of collaborating bodies aiming to spread this practice on a national scale. The study finds a large convergence in the theoretical- methodological references adopted for the institutional evaluation of the school, invariably committed to the perspective of improving the quality of education as well as in the proceedings for its implementation. It also addresses common issues, raised by their application.  

The aim of this article is to analyze the literature exams of the National Secondary School Exam (ENEM) and the entrance exam of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) to determine if both are consistent with the theoretical and methodological principle of literary literacy. A quantitative-qualitative, descriptive and interpretative study was conducted by analyzing a corpus formed by the UFPE and ENEM literature tests applied in December and October 2013, respectively. The results indicated that the exams are consistent with their standardizing documents; that the ENEM literature test is closer to the idea of literary literacy. Also, that there are other differences between them: the UFPE literature test is more content-oriented and gives more weight to the standard texts than the ENEM test, which is more constructivist and cognitivist.

Political changes introduced in Portugal by the Bologna Process accentuated the complexity of the challenges in higher education and teachers’ initial training. The commitment assumed for the creation of the European Space for Higher Education justified the reliance on comparable criteria to guarantee quality (SANTOS, 2011) and the introduction of procedures to promote improvement. The article analyzes the role of institutional evaluation in guaranteeing the desired quality. Therefore, we used either the data from the Portuguese legislation, or other documents, to place it in the transnational context. The opinions of professors directly involved in the organization of courses for the initial teacher education, obtained using a questionnaire, were also used. Analysis of these data allowed the conclusion that there is a relationship between evaluation and the improvement of the training offered to students, the future teachers.  

The Programme for International Student Assessment] (Pisa) 2012 used student-level questionnaires to evaluate the Opportunity to Learn Content defined as students’ exposure to subject content in school – in this case, specifically in the area of Mathematics. Based on the results of the questionnaires, three indexes related to students’ performance in a group of countries were generated. The study suggests that there is a relationship between two of the indexes and the mean scores in the Mathematics test, but this relationship is weak for the third index. These results can elucidate aspects about exposure to mathematical tasks and concepts in the classroom which are not always well known.

This study is a meta evaluation of the Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio [National Secondary Education Examination] (Enem) of 2009 and 2011, applying psychometric techniques to 2.025.268 tests. Some techniques were illustrated by analysis of item content, showing their usefulness to educators. We compared indicators related to the tests (α coefficient and average inter-item correlation), but mainly related to the items (item-whole correlation, biserial coefficient, discrimination and fit of two-parameter logistic model). The 2009 Mathematics test showed insufficient reliability (α <0.6). The Language and Human Sciences tests showed better quality indicators in both years. In total, we found 25% of items with anomalous empirical behavior in 2009 and 17% in 2011.

This article intends to analyze the articulation between institutional assessment (IAS) and pedagogical political project (PPP) based on a project conducted in a Brazilian municipality. It involved a sample of schools that developed a process for institutional assessment, in order to re-shape their PPP. We sought to examine whether and how these schools used the data from this assessment to reformulate their pedagogic projects. The text brings a reflection about the principles that guide and surpass the two processes. It aims both to evaluate the reason why it is so difficult to develop them and what their possibilities are.

Missing data are common in educational assessments. Using the appropriate methods has, therefore, become essential to reduce the impact of the loss of information. The present study aims to compare the performance of four methods for dealing with missing data (mean imputation, listwise deletion, maximum likelihood and multiple imputation), all based on regression models applied to the educational assessment of data collected in the State of Ceará. Information about 7,000 students was used, simulating various scenarios according to the percentage and the type of the missing data. The mean imputation method showed the worst performance in all simulated scenarios and the other methods showed similar results among themselves. Moreover, the use of auxiliary variables in the estimation by maximum likelihood and multiple imputation proved to reduce the bias of estimates of some important parameters of the model, when the simulated missing data is not random.

This article presents the conceptual constitution of Avaliação Institucional Participativa (AIP) [Participative Institutional Evaluation] and its formatting in the Geres-AI Project, in the educational policy of the city of Campinas and in the reform of the System of Educational Inspection in Angola. It addresses a model proposed in the Laboratório de Observação e Estudos Descritivos (LOED) [Laboratory of Observation and Descriptive Studies] at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, which has the goal of improving the social quality offered in the schools. Following the presentation of the context in which the institutional evaluation appears, as a counter-regulatory process, the main movements of these three experiences are described, explaining the characteristics of the model, its central concepts and presuppositions, and the importance of the role of the scholarly community. The winding paths of implementation, given the influence of several factors, requiring, therefore, planning and support of the governmental agencies can be observed.

This paper discusses interfaces between teacher training and educational policies. It analyses studies about teacher characteristics associated with improvements in student performance, by matching them with data of Brazilian teachers obtained from the Questionário do Professor da Prova Brasil/Avaliação Nacional da Educação Básica 2013 [Teacher of the Prova Brasil Test/National Assessment of Basic Education]. The sample is composed of 107,278 fifth grade teachers and 118,772 ninth grade teachers. The results show aspects of the teaching profile, including sex, age, professional practice, race and training. Some important gaps deserve attention, such as the training non-compliant with current legal guidelines. Faculty perceptions about student learning problems point to factors external to school, as more relevant to learning than internal factors. Reversing such expectations is a matter to be considered in the development of training policies.

The present article seeks to assess the impact of the Educational Performance Bonus, an incentive paid to employees of the state school network in Pernambuco, when they accomplish pre-established educational goals. The main objective of this paper is to verify whether this bonus policy led to better performance in Portuguese and Mathematics between 2008 and 2012. The methodology used to address this issue uses propensity scores to produce pairings, in which each school in the state network (participating in the bonus policy) is compared to a similar municipal school (which does not have such a policy). The main result shows that state schools have obtained, in the ninth grade, a gain of five points compared to those schools in the municipal network.

This paper aims is to propose a new methodology to calculate the Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (Ideb) [Basic Education Development Index] targets. The main reason for this is the realization that the Ideb targets, as they have been officially calculated, take into account only students’ approval data and performance assessed for a single year (2005) and based on data of the Brazilian School Census and the Prova Brasil. Besides that, the official calculation also fails to explicitly include the mean school socioeconomic status, which is nonetheless strongly correlated with school performance. Therefore, this paper analyzes a historical series of data of Minas Gerais state public schools in order to adjust it to a longitudinal hierarchical linear model which calculates the Ideb targets in a way that is similar, though not exactly the same to the one officially used, and that also takes into account the problems presented in the study.

This article investigated the National Evaluation System for Higher Education and its primary regulation indicator, the Preliminary Course Concept. A three-year cycle of the National Examination of Courses, encompassing 55 areas of undergraduate education, was used. The relationship between the inputs and the graduates’ grades was analyzed using multiple linear regression, retaining those grades which presented semi-partial correlations, significant at 5%. The results showed a lack of relationship in 11 of the 55 areas. In the others, the inputs with higher frequency of correlations were the grades for infrastructure and doctors. The correlation frequency was higher for universities, demonstrating that the indicator is more appropriate for these. The results demonstrate that the indicator does not show a relationship between input and output independent of the areas and institutions. Therefore, it cannot be used as an indicator of quality without a qualitative assessment of the context of the institution and the course.

The use of statistical data has been underestimated by part of educational literature for some time. Being aware of this, the present paper aims to discuss the use of educational indicators to understand the situation of this field. The text presents and analyzes education indicators regarding the enrollment of Special Needs pupils in Brazil between 1974 and 2014. The data are analyzed from a critical perspective, in connection with the area literature. The study challenges the way in which the Federal Government has been using such data, in order to demonstrate advances in school inclusion policy. The conclusion is that such indicators need to be developed from a perspective that considers the impacts of government action, and to be connected with other data and academic research.

The discourse that the economies are ever more interrelated has justified the major role played by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in relation to education and, especially regarding the investigation that led to this text, i.e., the importance the Organization has given to socio-emotional skills. We propose to investigate to what extent it would be possible to identify mechanisms that confirm the existence of a global educational governance project in OECD activities. The application of the analytical framework to the documents that composed our corpus, which was proposed by Charaudeau (2014), allowed us to affirm that the OECD has put into practice a real educational global governance project. This project not only deploys the three mechanisms of educational governance proposed by Jakobi and Martens (2010); the production of ideas, policy assessment and data generation, but also the cognitive and normative modes of governance, designed by Woodward (2009).

In this interview, Professor Mara Regina Lemes de Sordi, from the Faculty of Education of the University of Campinas, gives a detailed account of the experience of participatory institutional evaluation, developed in the municipal elementary schools of Campinas starting in 2006, in partnership with the Laboratory of Observation and Descriptive Studies (Loed). Among the main aspects covered, the reflections regarding the empowerment of the various school actors are emphasized, the direction of the School Evaluation Committees, the challenges, misconceptions and advancements reached in the experience, as well as the construction of a new school culture supported by participatory institutional evaluation.

This article discusses the educational indicator of higher education dropout in order to distinguish and problematize different conceptions and uses of the term in academic productions. The methodology consisted of a literature review of articles published between 1996 and 2015 that discuss higher education dropout and present a formula to calculate it. It was possible to verify that the use of the term is associated with different perspectives, temporalities, granularities and formulas. Considering this, the use of such an educational indicator for diagnosis, monitoring and assessment of courses, institutions, systems and public policies would require the development of a common concept and formula. Therefore, we highlight the relevance of reviewing this educational indicator in order to avoid the risk of comparisons that would be statistically incomparable.

We aimed to relate the characteristics of schools that are associated with the probability of them achieving the objectives of the Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (Ideb) [Elementary Education Development Index] 2013. These objectives are to analyze the association of the Ideb goal with other educational indicators as well as to compare the initial and final years of elementary school. We used the following quantitative methods: descriptive statistics, Item Response Theory and logistic regression (N initial years = 36,236 schools and N final years = 29,095 schools). In the initial years, the variable with the greatest impact on the likelihood of the school achieving the Ideb goal is infrastructure. However, in the final years, the variables with the greatest impact are socioeconomic status and infrastructure. The variables function differently between the initial and final years (e.g. socioeconomic status presents positive impact in the initial years and negative in the final years). Some associations between the Ideb and other educational indicators are different when the issue in question is the goal of the Ideb.

This article presents two indicators that summarize complex dimensions of schools: intervention for improvement and school curriculum. They were constructed with the data provided by the Basic Education Evaluation System by means of the Item Response Theory. The indicators were used to analyze students’ learning in elementary education in public schools and to test hypotheses regarding inequality among students with and without age-gap using statistical models. Schools with higher scores in the two indicators increase students’ chances to be at the highest levels of learning. However, the practices summarized in the indicators contribute to reduce the differences between students with and without age-gap only in relation to their chances of being at the basic level. The indicators should not be used in a deterministic way, but they have the potential to show problems or successes in pedagogical practices in schools.

This article aims to suggest a group of indicators useful to analyze in a comparative way the quality of infrastructure of early childhood facilities in the public school system. The challenge we set for ourselves was to answer questions such as: would it be possible to assess the quality of an entire school system? How do we compare different institutions in order to prioritize and maximize the public resources invested? Are there indicators that can be measured objectively and used in any educational environment? The study presents one of many possible answers, proposing quality indicators for checking the infrastructure, which can be applied to all the institutions of child-care education in Brazil, based on the example of two municipalities.