Conference Program

Over the last years, the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy) has institutionalised the use of data from an annual upper-secondary “student customer survey” (around 5,000 respondents per year) as part of its broader school evaluation and improvement infrastructure. Originally designed to capture students’ overall satisfaction, the survey includes a specific section on teaching quality, inspired by the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) framework, aimed at eliciting students’ perceptions of key instructional dimensions such as clarity, classroom climate, support, and engagement (Kane & Staiger, 2012; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013). Results are routinely returned to schools in aggregated form and can inform professional discussion, self-evaluation processes, and school improvement priorities.

This paper discusses the educational potential and governance implications of these data through two complementary analytical levels.

First, at the provincial level, we analyse repeated cross-sectional survey data collected since 2018. We examine (i) the internal coherence of the teaching-quality items, (ii) differences across schools, and (iii) recurring patterns in students’ perceptions of instruction. The aim is not ranking schools, but documenting how student voice (when framed as formative feedback) can support improvement-oriented evaluation practices and strengthen a shared evidence base for decision-making (Datnow & Hubbard, 2015; Coburn & Turner, 2011).

Second, we develop a school-level case study focusing on the Istituto Tecnico Tecnologico “G. Marconi” (Rovereto), which experimented with a more articulated approach to feedback and data use. Beyond the provincial aggregated reports, the school adopted procedures for teacher-level feedback reporting based on a survey instrument largely aligned with the provincial item battery, and complemented these quantitative data with qualitative documentation produced internally to justify, communicate, and support the practice. The case is examined as an instance of “boundary work” between accountability and professional learning, where data use is embedded in collegial discussion and transparency-oriented routines designed to enhance legitimacy and reduce defensive uses of evidence (Earl & Katz, 2006; Schildkamp, 2019). The school’s documents and routines are analysed to highlight how local leadership mediates between evidence, interpretation, and decision-making, and how this mediation affects the perceived fairness and sustainability of evaluation processes (Paletta, 2014).

Overall, findings suggest that student survey data can contribute to improvement, equity, and well-being goals only when they are translated into shared interpretive practices, supported by validated tools, and combined with qualitative evidence that contextualises results. The paper concludes by discussing conditions under which evaluation data may operate as a democratic resource for school communities (supporting professional responsibility and collective learning) rather than as a purely managerial device.