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.
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.
This work sets out to answer questions such as, what have we learned after three decades of research into school effectiveness? What can we say with confidence about how schools improve? It reviews findings from seminal international work.
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.
The time has come to challenge many of the age-old assumptions about schools and school learning. In this timely book leading thinkers from around the world offer a different vision of what schools are for. They suggest new ways of thinking about citizenship, lifelong learning and the role of schools in democratic societies. They question many of the tenets of school effectiveness studies which have been so influential in shaping policy, but are essentially backward looking and premised on school structures as we have known them. Each chapter confronts some of the myths of schooling we have cherished for too long and asks us to think again and to do schools differently. Chapters include: * Democratic learning and school effectiveness * Learning democracy in an age of mangerial accountability * Democratic leadership for school improvement in challenging contexts. This book will be of particular interest to anyone involved in school improvement and effectiveness, including academics and researchers in this field of study. Headteachers and LEA advisers will also find this book a useful resource.
What constitutes quality schooling? What are the implications for educational practice and administration? The text looks at these questions and examines international research evidence and reform initiatives with particular emphasis on North America, UK, Australasia and the Third World. It offers a synopsis of the Third World School Effects Research (SER). The authors claim that the challenges now facing educational leaders is to find a balance between SER and the other school movements and to ask more demanding questions of our educational systems.
This guide helps educators implement a continuous school improvement system through application of the seven correlates of effective schools. The authors discuss each correlate, update the knowledge base, and incorporate practical ideas from practitioners in the field. A comprehensive description of practices enables educators to build and sustain a school culture that accommodates the learning expectations and needs of all students.