Advances in School Effectiveness Research and Practice presents a worldwide state-of-the-art summary of the rapidly growing field of school effectiveness research by an internationally renowned group of authors. Current knowledge in the field is reviewed to present an integrated and coherent, internationally valid perspective on school effectiveness and instructional effectiveness. The book creatively outlines some new directions in which the field should move if it is to fulfil its promise. These include the development of international studies and the generating and testing of school effectiveness theory.

Methodological Advances in Educational Effectiveness Research is an important new work by some of the leading researchers in the field of Educational Effectiveness Research (EER). The book provides a state of the art snapshot of the methodology of EER now and clearly demonstrates the way it is applied in both research and evaluation. It shows how developments in the research methodology area such as the use of multilevel modelling approaches to analyse nested data have promoted the knowledge-base of educational effectiveness. But at the same time, as the authors show, the knowledge-base of educational effectiveness and the attempt to establish theoretical models do paradoxically challenge the development of methodologically appropriate studies including ways of analysing data. Guiding readers though the effective and appropriate use in educational effectiveness of: Longitudinal Studies Experimental Studies Mixed Research Methods Meta-analyses of effectiveness studies Using IRT to measure outcomes and factors Using Generalisability Theory to test the quality of data Multilevel modelling , and Structural Equation Modelling Techniques The authors draw in the expertise of scholars from around the world to show the mathematical background of each technique, the current and future applications, and Specific examples of applying this orientation to help the readers design their own effectiveness studies using specific methodological tools.

This volume explores the influence of students' background on educational outcomes, ways of contextualising school performance, and current issues and developments in school effectiveness research. Also investigated is how the research contributes to understanding of school and classroom processes.

This book explores the key characteristics that make a school effective.

This book provides a theoretical and practical account of a successful design-based research-practice partnership, the Learning Schools Model. The Model has built school capability and improved valued student outcomes for primarily indigenous and ethnic minority students for over 15 years and across five countries.

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

This book is a critical assessment of the knowledge base on educational effectiveness, covering a period of five decades of research. It formulates a “lean” theory of good schooling, and identifies and explains instances of “ineffectiveness”, such as low effect sizes of malleable conditions, for which expectations are highly strung. The book presents a systemic outlook on educational effectiveness and improvement, as it starts out from an integrated multi-level model that comprises system level, school level and instructional conditions. It offers a classification of school improvement strategies and scenarios for system level educational improvement. Above all, the analysis is very systematic, comprehensive and strongly grounded in theory. The book includes a case study analysis of various strands of improvement-oriented educational policy in the Netherlands as an illustration of some of the arguments used.

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

This is a collection of 19 articles charting developments in school effectiveness research, both on the evaluative and reflective side, and the emergence from it of pro-active school improvement ideas and initiatives.