Teaching Groups as Foci for Evaluating Performance in Cost Effectuveness of Gce Advanced Level Provision: Some Practical Methodological Innovations

The use of hierarchical models of educational effectiveness are reviewed. The paper also draws attention to the inadequacy of official performance indicators currently available and in particular the inattention to resource issues. Research on this issue using teaching group cost and performance has led the present author in collaboration with others to focus on costeffectiveness issues. These issues are discussed in the paper and draw out some new methodological issues. The concern is with evaluating the performance of students on GCE Advanced Level courses at the level of the subject group with the intention of relating this to identified teaching group costs. Since students belong to several groups standard hierarchical modelling which assumes responses at the individual level are independent are precluded. Thus models are adopted which cross classify students and groups and investigate the issue using the procedures of Rasbash and Goldstein (1994). The data arises from 6020 subject entries for 2280 candidates in 525 teaching groups from 14 institutions. The impact of ignoring the crossing on substantive results is examined. A further issue in cost-effectiveness work is differential teacher effectiveness since salaries are the largest component of costs. Hill and Rowe (1996) have attributed part of the reason for sparsity of work on teacher effectiveness to the fact that classes are exposed to several teachers. This paper approaches the issue through three way 1 Some parts of this paper were presented at the 10 International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement , University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and at the Royal Statistical Society Birmingham Local Group , both in January 1998. Continuation of work has been supported under the Analysis of Large and Complex Datasets programme by the ESRC through award H51944500497 whilst the author was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Multilevel Models Project , University of London Institute of Education. Acknowledgements are due to Michael Healy and David Reynolds for helpful comments on earlier drafts.