Assessment any Evaluation in School - Parental Involvement for a New Culture of Evaluation in Europe March 24, 2011

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

partners in European education,

friends and members!

It is a pleasure to formally invite you to the first EPA conference in Hungary co-organised with our Hungarian member association MPT (Hungarian Pedagogic Society)/Comenius Workshop. We take up an old EPA idea to follow the European Presidencies and bring our members together in the country in charge.

When parents talk about school they are mostly concerned about their child’s grades and certificates. Though many critical considerations are made on processes and validity of judging students’ performance these determine the ongoing pathway of education and life. Thus the role of school grades can hardly be over-estimated.

During the last years national testing and educational standards as well as national and international system evaluation have gained increasing in parallel to normal school assessment. Governments are challenged to define school quality and provide means to prove the performance of the system. International “challenges” like PISA brought school performance into magazine headlines generating public discussion and triggering national ambitions to perform well in a kind of international “school championship”.

European history has granted us an incredibly rich diversity of cultural heritage. Among are the numerous traditions of school systems that hardly can be compared. EPA has repeated to point out that this diversity has to be seen as a value. Nevertheless the desired mobility in lifelong learning creates a demand for equivalence in certified learning outcomes.

European parents’ representatives are sceptic whether there is a valid image of school quality on any level of system evaluation. We are thus interested to get into the matter and learn about various aspects and options to gain a new view. We want to contribute to the development of a new culture of evaluation in European schools.

We are looking forward to meet you in Budapest and hope to proceed on our personal way in Lifelong Learning.

Johannes Theiner
EPA-President

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Ellenőrzés és értékelés az iskolában

Az EPA (Európai Szülők Egyesülete) és a Magyar Pedagógiai Társaság Comenius Műhelye Budapesten várja az érdeklődőket nemzetközi konferenciájára. Az első magyarországi EPA konferenciára mindazon szülőket, pedagógusokat, szakértőket várják, akik nyitottak más európai országok jó gyakorlataira, illetve szeretnének részt venni egy közös gondolkodásban többek között a különböző európai iskolarendszerekre, ellenőrzési és értékelési kultúrára, gyakorlataira, a kulcskompetenciák elsajátítására, a párbeszédre és a szülői részvételre vonatkozóan.

Időpont: 2011. március 25-26.

Conference information provided by konferenciakalauz.hu

Official Website: http://www.epa-parents.eu/next_ga