EDUCATIONAL DIAGNOSTICS FOR CONTEMPORARY SCHOOL SYSTEMS. MEASURING AND ASSESSING GROWTH OF STUDENT HUMAN CAPITAL. PART II: METHODOLOGY AND RULES

Developmental paradigms, preferred in educational diagnostics to intervening ones, need vertical scaling, i.e. norms extended across a time passage or a learning cycle. Value added is perceived in education as a progress made by a student or a group of students in a period of time in a well-defined area of attitudes or skills. It may be evaluated in raw scores, percentiles, stanines, grade equivalents or logits (theta scale). Grade equivalents (GE) are numbers of years and months of schooling to yield given achievement levels. They are easy to calculate but possibly misleading. A layman may abuse them and suggest allocating students into school grades according to their GE indexes what would inevitably destroy the educational system. Much more statistically advanced scaling is based on Item Response Theory (IRT) which is a probabilistic theory concerning the relation of an item score with the human property constituting a latent variable. We may apply IRT to mental test items, interview questions, behavioral categories, and even factual information obtained in document analyses. The most influential context variable in educational diagnostics is socio-economic status of a student’s family (SES) as indicated by the parents’ education and vocational positions, their income level and social prestige. Both educational aspirations and examination scores are to large extent determined by SES. Two further unfavorable phenomena of school learning are intellectual helplessness which appears when a student’s efforts to master the content of one or more school subjects proves totally unsuccessful, and learned one-sidedness that is a damage to a student’s personality caused by his/her aspiration to be the best learner at school. Most educational systems assume „equalizing educational chances for every child”, „diminishing the gap between the best and the weakest” and making „no child left behind”. However, the politically fair ideas cannot stand psychological law of fan effect, that is an increase of achievement variance which comes with achievement growth in a population