Context Variables Analysis: A design of context questionnaires for the education systems evaluation (AVACO).

The education systems evaluations, so much the autonomous ones, as the national ones and even the international ones (STEP or TIMMS projects), they all usually present, as a weaker aspect of their position, their limited capacity of achievement explanation. This question redounds in the practise with a low impact and it commits their utility. Nevertheless, this fact is not due to the lack of developed instruments to measure the achievement, that they are usually quite sophisticated and they present good levels of technical adaptation (about reliability and validity), but rather to an inadequate orientation of the context instruments.

The context instruments are usually questionnaires directed to students, families and school agents (like teachers, or guiding teams) whose purpose is to manage to get information about input, process and context variables to be used in the evaluation plan for explaining the different achievement levels, defining elements over we can intervene to improve the educational action.

This project starts from the Differential Pedagogy review, directed to identify differential and differentiating variables that can be interested en the education systems evaluation plans, as well as the available instruments for its evaluation or/and measuring. The aim of this project is to value the reduction possibilities from these measures to key indicators, capable of being present in contexts scales or questionnaires, and drawing up usable instruments in this kind of evaluation plans.

The project objectives can be synthesized in the following ones: 1. Input, process and context variables analysis for the education systems evaluation. 2. Context Questionnaires Design. 3. Instrument Validation.