The relationship between teachers’ evidence-based actions and communication, cooperation, and participation structures at schools

Abstract

In Germany, the school sector is being re-organized to feature more output orientation at schools in accordance with the new governance model (NGM), following the new public management paradigm. Newly implemented measures, such as learning standards and school inspections, are generating new evaluation data. However, school improvement can ensue only if findings from evaluations are considered in school and classroom practice. There is little research on how teachers’ orientation towards and use of empirical evidence is related to the changes in school structural conditions under the NGM as seen from the teachers’ perspective. In this article, we analyze how teachers’ orientation towards empirical data from internal and external sources, which is considered an indicator of teachers’ evidence-based actions, is related to school structures such as communication and information retrieval, internal and external cooperation, and participation. The analyses were based on a survey of 1,387 teachers from 124 schools conducted in the project Evidence-based actions within the multilevel system of schools (EviS) in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. We analyzed the data using structural equation models considering the nested data structure. We show that communication and information retrieval, internal and external cooperation, and participation structures explain up to 55 % of the variance of teachers’ internal evidence orientation.