The Victorian Quality Schools Project: a study of school and teacher effectiveness: report (vol. 1)

Abstract

This report follows a successful application for funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) to complete additional stages of the Victorian Quality Schools Project (VQSP) - a longitudinal study of school and teacher effectiveness undertaken in a large sample of government, Catholic and independent schools in Victoria. Commencing in 1992, the project had been jointly funded by the Victorian Directorate of School Education (DSE) and The University of Melbourne, under an agreement that expired at the end of 1994. Funding existed to complete the third and final phase of data collection during 1994 and to complete analyses of the data for the purposes of reporting to participating schools and to the DSE. However, funding was unavailable to pursue important findings arising from preliminary analyses of the 1992 and 1993 data through further analysis of the 1994 data and the combined 1992-1994 data, or to complete intensive on-site case studies of selected schools designed to illuminate results derived from statistical modelling of the data.

By the end of 1994, the VQSP had generated one of the most comprehensive and significant data bases on school and teacher effectiveness ever assembled. It is the first major empirical study of school effectiveness undertaken within Australia, and one of few internationally to collect longitudinal measures of schools, teachers and students using a design that has enabled the estimation of both school and class/teacher effects. Preliminary analyses of the data (Hill et al., 1993a; Rowe et al., 1994, 1995; Hill & Rowe, 1996) have suggested that conventional views on school-level effects need to be re-evaluated in the light of the VQSP findings, and that much of what is generally regarded as effects due to student and school characteristics are in fact due to effects operating at the class/teacher-level. Further analysis and qualitative follow-up of this data base offered the very real prospect of major conceptual and methodological advances in the field of school effectiveness research, with consequent practical spin-offs for school reform endeavours world-wide.

Thus, support from the ARC was sought to fund an additional one-year phase of the project during the course of 1995 and early 1996 to examine in greater detail both quantitative and qualitative hypotheses arising from initial analyses of the VQSP data. Funding granted by the ARC via Grant No. 7953 J244 has enabled this additional work to be undertaken. The present report describes this work and presents the relevant findings. A key feature of the report is the documentation of the data-gathering instruments that have been used throughout the project and their related coding manuals, together with the normative and measurement properties of the scales and constituent items. A summative overview of the major findings from the study is also provided.