Value Added Monitoring and Zero Target Setting

This article is an extract from a larger document that has been created by Bill Hodgson, a user of the ALIS system for many years. The views expressed in this articles are those of Bill Hodgson, however CEM has checked the statistical information contained in the article for accuracy.

Users of Alis may find the processes described in this article useful. Bill Hodgson is a Senior Lecturer at a large tertiary college. After beginning a career as a research chemist he moved into education, working in two secondary schools before moving into Further Education. A former post-graduate student of Carol Fitz-Gibbon (the founder of the Curriculum Evaluation and Management Centre and the ALIS Project) he completed a PhD in the mid 1990s. In this research study he made extensive use of ‘value added’ methods. At the college where he works he is responsible for value added development work, including using value added to monitor course effectiveness and to underpin formative work with students to raise achievement. The software provided by the ALIS Project, called PARIS, is used extensively to provide formative value added information as part of a regular system of termly Progress Reviews. This work on ‘Value Added Monitoring and Zero Target Setting’ sets out different ways that ‘value added’ can be used. These include its uses as part of a formative process and as a summative technique, for promoting quality assurance and quality improvement. It considers the internal systems and support needed to underpin value added development work in schools and colleges and some of the issues in relation to target setting and formative work with individual students. The full document includes examples of resource materials that could support the use of value added in schools and colleges.

A cut down version of VAMZTS is available here

The Full version of VAMZTS can be downloaded here