Suchergebnisse

The Eduscopio project is the first attempt to build school performance indicators based on the university performance of high school leavers in Italy. It provides stakeholders (students and their families) with publicly available school performance indicators, and school rankings. A potential weakness of Eduscopio is that it relies on first-year student performance only. In this study, we extend its methodology to include longer-term academic outcomes, such as cumulative third-year performance and the probability of on-time graduation. Our results demonstrate that differences in university students' performance across high schools are not temporary and limited to the first-year, but persist in the following academic years, and that the ranking of high schools based on longer-term indicators remains rather stable. Moreover, our analysis highlights non-negligible differences of between-school track dispersion in the Eduscopio index across cities, which hints on geographical differences in student selection mechanisms into school tracks or in the level of dispersion of school value added within tracks.

In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of implementing performance- based university research funding systems (PRFSs) in terms of both the quantity and «quality» (i.e. citation impact) of research outputs (measured through the Web of Science database). The Italian experience of the first two Research Evaluation Exercises is examined. We use a difference-in-differences in reverse (DDR) strategy, in which a country where a PRFS was always in place during the period of analysis – the «always treated» country, the UK – is compared with a country that switched from not having to implementing a PRFS – the «switched» country, Italy. Our analysis highlights that PRFSs are associated with an improvement in the average «quality» of research output (percentage of documents cited in the Web of Science database), although they do not positively impact output quantity (number of articles), which actually decreases, or «excellent» outputs (measured as the percentage of top-cited articles). An analysis of heterogeneous effects by scientific discipline shows that the effect on research «quality» concerns all fields except the humanities, with some positive effects on excellent research outputs in most hard sciences. Effects on research quality were not generalised but were observed only for the second research evaluation exercise. Other innovations introduced in the university system (the National Scientific Habilitation) may have partly contributed to this result.