Quality assessment and assurance in Slovene schools through selfevaluation research

Vesna Podgornik

Summary:  Quality assessment and assurance in the Slovene school system is legally regulated by the Organization and Financing of Education Act, which requires head teachers to ensure quality assessment and assurance using self-evaluation and self-evaluation annual reports. This makes self- evaluation an important element in assessing and assuring the quality of education. Starting from our empirical research study conducted with a representative sample of teachers, school counsellors and head teachers, the article studies the respondents’ attitudes toward undertaking self-evaluation research studies in Slovenian primary and secondary schools. We have found that the majority of our respondents think that self-evaluation is important or very important to the occupation they have. The process of self-evaluation as a procedure of assessing and assuring quality in Slovenia derives support from various quality-improvement projects. Therefore, we investigated which projects the responding educators know and use in the institutions where they work. Primary school educators are most familiar with the project Networks of Learning Schools, which they also use most frequently. The projects that secondary schools use most extensively are Networks of Learning Schools and Offering Quality Education to Adults. Multiple regression analysis has demonstrated that the educators’ views of the necessity of continuous professional development, their interest in research work and knowledge of how to carry out self-evaluation, as well as school managements’ encouragement of teachers to carry out self-evaluation are strong predictors of differences among educators in attitudes regarding the importance of self-evaluation to the occupation they have.