The doctoral project explores the question of what school performance is in individualised learning cultures or is negotiated and recognised as such. This question is based on the assumption that the understanding of school performance is changing with regard to the reform strategy of individualisation and opening up teaching.

As part of an ethnographically designed study, fields of action for talking about performance between teachers, students and parents outside of the classroom and the practice of exchanging and counselling about and re-registering and evaluating school performance situated in these fields of action will be examined. These are understood as places where school performance is constructed.

The ethnographic data collected at two selected reform-oriented secondary schools are analysed using the three-step coding procedure of grounded theory.