Construction and Application of SACMEQ School Resources : Portray of School Systems Based on the Rasch Scaling Technique

A School Resources Index (SRI) was constructed using the Rasch scaling technique. Data were from the pooled school resource items that were collected from pupils, teachers, and school heads derived from two sub-regional studies undertaken by Southern and Eastern Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) in 1995 and 2000. Capitalizing on the possibility to link more items, the new scale provided a stronger positive correlation between the school resources and the pupils' achievement compared to using the initial variable containing the summation of school resource possessions. This SACMEQ SRI provided a reliable and valid instrument to compare the resource level among different school systems with varied levels of economic development. It also provided a meaningful tool to examine the changes in the school resources between two different time points. From the SACMEQ SRI, the hierarchical resource “profiles" were also established. The profiles could be used as a guideline of standard to identify more critical and relevant resource items at each progress level, for better budgetary planning, resource allocation, priority setting, and benchmarking.