A study of external school evaluators' competencies for grade levels 1-12 quality assessment in Thailand

Abstract

Competent school evaluators may be able to identify the causes of underachieving schools and provide data that will help school practitioners to improve teaching and learning. In Thailand, a sizeable portion of the government budget has been spent on educational evaluation under the responsibility of the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA), highlighting the important role that school evaluators can potentially play in improving Thai schools. This study updated two sets of competencies for external educational evaluators of school quality at grade levels 1-12 in the Thai educational context as originally developed by Guah (2004) and Piyamas (2005). To conduct this update, the researcher used knowledge from the scholarly literature on evaluator competencies and, through four extensive surveys, collected opinions and suggestions from Thai evaluation and education experts as part of the process of developing a new set of competencies for Thai external school evaluators. The Combination Job Analysis Method (C-JAM) was used as a framework to collect and analyze data. Two sets of competencies, one for training and one for selecting evaluators, are proposed along with recommendations for practice and for additional research.