The paper proposes to study side effects of accountability in education within the theoretical framework of enactment research. The potential value of this approach for the study of side effects is shown by using the example of the side effect “Dependency on Expert Judgements.” Therefore, findings from the research project “Unintended Effects of Accountability in the School System” (acronym “Nefo”) are presented. The project entailed an analysis of policy documents to describe the accountability contexts under study, as well as a survey study with 2637 participating teachers and principals to examine the distribution of side effects in the no- and low-stakes contexts of the four German federal states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Rhineland-Palatinate. The findings for Berlin and Thuringia are triangulated with the results from a qualitative in-depth group-discussion substudy of the Nefo project on how teachers in Berlin and Thuringia deal with accountability measures. The analysis of policy documents reveals that in Berlin, performance results gain the status of objective data that teachers need to improve their work, while teachers in Thuringia are prompted to judge by themselves the meaning of performance results for their teaching. This suggests that “Dependency on Expert Judgements” is a larger issue in Berlin than in Thuringia. However, contrary to what would be expected, the findings of the survey study indicate that the side effect plays a greater role in Thuringia than in Berlin. To explain this counterintuitive finding, teachers’ responses to standards-based accountability in Berlin and Thuringia are delineated. The paper shows that the study of meaning-making processes, which is central to the enactment framework, must not only be ignored if one tries to understand the processes that lead to the occurrence or absence of side effects. It is also important to prevent fallacies in the interpretation of survey data.

本文建议在立法研究的理论框架内研究教育问责制的副作用。通过使用副作用“依赖专家判断”的示例，显示了该方法对副作用的研究的潜在价值。因此，提出了研究项目“学校系统中问责制的意外影响”（缩写为“ Nefo”）的发现。该项目需要对政策文件进行分析，以描述所研究的问责制背景，以及一项针对2637名参与教师和校长的调查研究，以考察德国四个联邦州在无利益和低利益环境下的副作用分布柏林，勃兰登堡州，图林根州和莱茵兰-普法尔茨州。柏林和图林根州的调查结果与Nefo项目关于柏林和图林根州教师如何处理问责措施的定性深入小组讨论子研究的结果相结合。对政策文件的分析表明，在柏林，绩效结果获得了教师需要改进工作的客观数据的地位，而图林根州的教师被提示自行判断绩效结果对他们的教学的意义。这表明，与图林根州相比，“依赖专家判断”是一个更大的问题。然而，与预期相反，调查研究的结果表明，图林根州的副作用比柏林更重要。为了解释这一违反直觉的发现，描绘了教师对柏林和图林根州基于标准的问责制的回应。本文表明，对于制定框架至关重要的意义形成过程的研究，不仅要试图理解导致副作用发生或不存在的过程，就必须予以忽略。防止在解释调查数据时出现谬误也很重要。