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Value Added, School Quality and Student Outcomes

This project aimed at calculating value-added scores to measure the quality of schools, thereby enabling comparisons with other quality measures and student outcomes after graduation.

Project manager
Project participants
Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, IFN

The Swedish education system lacks rigorous measures of school quality. Systematic quality improvement in schools and municipalities rests on the ability to compare schools and track the development of quality. Value-added scores are an established measure of school quality in the research literature but have hardly come to practical use in the Swedish education system. Value-added scores measure the extent to which schools’ students perform better than what is expected, given their previous results as well as their background characteristics.  

The project was financed within the research program The Economics of the Service Sector and the applied parts of the project also from the organizations that took part in them including IES and Kunskapsskolan.