A Value Added Approach in Upper Secondary Schools of Lombardy by OCSE-PISA 2009 data

In the last decade a great deal of interest at the national and international level has been shown in measuring the school impact on student achievement. Standardized tests and the Value Added Methodology have emerged as the appropriate instruments for this purpose. The aim of this paper is to find a value added measure for upper secondary schools of the Lombardy region from the OECD-PISA 2009 data. The initial cognitive level of the student, which is necessary for the analysis, has been obtained by summarizing different teachers’ evaluations from a Rasch analysis. A multilevel model has been fitted to control the student and school factors effecting the reading results. In particular, even the reading enjoyment variable has been considered, since it explains a high variability of student performance. The ranking of the upper secondary schools based on the value added measures is compared with the one obtained using raw data, showing significantly different results.