Multilevel models for the evaluation of educational institutions: a review

Abstract

The methodology for the evaluation of educational systems is being developed in different fields, such as educational statistics, psychometrics, sociology and econometrics. Each discipline has developed approaches suitable for the analysis of particular aspects of the evaluation process. For example, educational statistics focuses on learning curves using standardized scores, while econometrics mainly deals with private returns (e.g. in terms of wages) or social returns (e.g. in terms of productivity). Anyway, there is a considerable overlap among the fields, for example peer effects are studied both in educational statistics, as a major topic, and econometrics, as a minor topic.