Educational indicators
What is an indicator ?
This is a descriptive and analytic tool which informs, in education, about the quality and the equity of an education system, about the students’ knowledge and competences, etc. In this field, it is indeed obviously insufficient to get ready-made, inaccurate and incomplete representations, to characterize an education system through its components, their interactions and their evolution.
Yearly publications, such as Education at a glance (OECD) or Les indicateurs de l'enseignement provide the service of monitoring (pilotage) with the most objective data.
Indicators of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation
The researchers of the aSPe played a main part in the history of these indicators, participating in the inter-university research team designated by the ministry of the French Community to undertake the development of a relevant structure for an indicator system (2003-2004).
Baye, A., Lafontaine, D., Nicaise, J., Chasse, S., Delvaux, B., Maes, J., Jaspar, S., De Ketele, J., Dumay, X., Dupriez, V., Giraldo, S., Letor, C., Lison, C., Maroy, C., Cortese, V., Desmarez, P., Veinstein, M., Delooz, P., & Dupont, P. (2004). Définition d'un système d'indicateurs pour l'enseignement fondamental et secondaire en Communauté française : rapport final de la recherche. Liège, Belgique : Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Service de Pédagogie expérimentale de l’Université.
http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/7047
These indicators apply to the following topics :
- AUDIENCES, for instance, Publics de l'enseignement spécialisé : effectifs et âge (Student populations of special education : enrolment and age)
- SCHOOL CAREERS, for instance, Retard scolaire dans l’enseignement ordinaire de plein exercice (School retention in regular education)
- OUTCOMES, for instance, Compétences en lecture des élèves de 2e primaire (2010) (Reading competences of pupils in 2d year of primary school)
- STAFF, for instance, Formation initiale des enseignants de l’enseignement obligatoire (Initial training of compulsory education teachers) and
- ORGANIZATION.
Since 2006, the successive publications can be downloaded from the site ‘Enseignement.be’. The aSPe researchers, including Ariane Baye, contributed to the construction of school outcomes indicators.
International indicators
aSPE researchers are regularly requested or spontaneously propose to construct international indicator systems in various domains. Either for the Walloon region, or for the OECD, or in the context of European projects, aSPe has gained a strong expertise in the indicator conception field.
