Jaap Scheerens

A Research Review

Opportunity to Learn, Curriculum Alignment and Test Preparation

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation

Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques

Centre pour la recherche et l'innovation dans l'enseignement

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris (France). Centre for Educational Research and Innovation

As part of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development project on international educational indicators, four networks were formed to represent different domains. This collection contains background papers that were prepared to deal with some of the fundamental questions about process indicators examined by Network "C," the network that, under the leadership of The Netherlands, was given the task of measuring indicators of schools and school processes. The following papers are included: (1) "Internationally Comparable Indicators of Educational Programmes and Processes: Identification, Measurement and Interpretation" (Jaap Scheerens); (2) "Comparer les structure de decision des systemes educatifs: un bilan de l'approache quantitative (Comparison of Decision-Making Structures in Education Systems: A Review of the Quantitative Approach)" (Denis Meuet, Jacques Prod'hom, and Eugen Stocker); (3) "The Selection and Definition of International Indicators on Teachers" (Jaap Scheerens); (4) "Curriculum Indicators in International Comparative Research" (Willem J. Pelgrum, Joke Voogt, and Tjeerd Plomp); (5) "Process Indicators on School Functioning and the Generalisability of School Factor Models across Countries" (Bert Creemers); (6) "The Development of Indicators on Equity in Education" (Alan Gibson and Denis Meuret); (7) "The Search for Indicators on the Effective Functioning of Tertiary Education Institutions" (Alan Gibson); (8) "The Use of Performance Indicators in School Improvement and Accountability" (Carmo Climaco); (9) "Perspectives on Decision-Making in Education Systems and the Development of the Network C Locus of Decision-Making Survey" (Darrel Drury, Laura Hersh Salganik, and Marilyn M. McMillen); (10) "La mise en place d'un dispositif d'indicateurs pour le pilotage des establissements secondaires francais (Implementation of a System of Indicators for the Steering of French Secondary Schools)" (Jean-Calude Emin); and (11) "Interpretation and Use of Education Indicators" (Erik Wallin). Each chapter contains references. (Contains 2 boxes, 17 figures, and 19 tables.) (SLD)

Measuring the Quality of Schools

This highly detailed study maps four decades of evolution of the concept of what constitutes effective school leadership. It analyses the theoretical background to these developments and advocates the utility of thinking of a ‘lean’ form of school leadership that is comparable to the concept of ‘meta-control’. A wide-ranging survey of the empirical research literature on leadership effects includes the presentation of results from earlier meta-analyses as well as a new meta-analysis on some 25 studies carried out between 2005 and 2010. This survey demonstrates that older reviews and meta-analyses were predominantly based on so-called ‘direct effect’ studies, while more recent studies have tried to quantify the indirect effects of leadership, mediated by other school variables. While acknowledging the relatively small total effect of leadership on student outcomes, the study does identify promising intermediary factors which, stimulated by specific leadership behaviours, impact on student performance. The book ends by drawing out wider implications for educational practice and policy, presented under headings such as ‘schools need leadership’, ‘the toolkit of the school leader as a meta-controller’, ‘the special case of turning around failing schools’ and ‘efficiency of school leadership’. In passing, the authors make several suggestions about potentially fruitful next steps in researching the effects of school leadership.

Review and Meta-Analysis of Empirical Studies

School Leadership Effects Revisited

Roel J. Bosker

Offers an analysis of the knowledge base on educational effectiveness. This book defines the concepts of school and educational analysis. It demonstrates the scope and range of application of the concept of school effectiveness. It focuses on modelling and theoretical interpretation of educational effectiveness.

The Foundations of Educational Effectiveness

This book provides a review of the effectiveness of Opportunity to Learn (OTL) operationalized as the association between OTL and student achievement. In addition, it presents an elaborate conceptual map in which OTL is regarded as part of a larger concept of curriculum alignment. Major components of this framework are national goals and standards, school curricula, formative tests, textbooks, actual delivery of content as part of teaching, and summative tests and examinations.Alignment between educational goals, intended and implemented curricula, and educational outcomes is considered an important prerequisite for effective education. The expectation is that better alignment leads to better student performance. The concept of OTL is commonly used to compare content covered, as part of the implemented curriculum, with student achievement. As such it is to be seen as a facet of the broader concept of “alignment”. As it comes to enhancing OTL in educational policy and practice, proactive curriculum development is compared to a more retroactive orientation. Legitimate forms of test and examination preparation belong to this retroactive orientation, and are seen as favorable conditions for optimizing OTL. This book reviews the research evidence on the effects of OTL on student achievement by means of detailed descriptions of key-empirical studies, a review of meta-analyses, a “vote count” syntheses of 51 empirical studies, conducted between 1995 and 2015, and a secondary analysis based on TIMSS 2011, and PISA 2012 data. It concludes that the effect size of OTL, at about .30, is modest, but comparable in size to other effectiveness-enhancing conditions in schooling. The final chapter of the book provides suggestions for educational policy and practice to further optimize OTL. /div

Cees Glas

Sally M. Thomas

This book looks at the foundations of school self-evaluation from a scientific as from a practical perspective. Planning concepts, restructuring of education systems, organizational theory on schools, evaluation methodology and models of school effectiveness and school improvement are discussed as contributing to the overall conceptualization of school self-evaluation. A broad range of approaches is presented and methodological requirements are discussed. School self-evaluation contains controversial issues that reflect tension between the need for objectivity in a context that is permeated by values and potential conflicts of interests. Similar tensions may be seen to exist with respect to the static and "reductionist" aspects of available data collection procedures in a complex and dynamic situation and the appeal for external accountability on the one hand and improvement oriented self-refection on the other. The mission of the book is to clarify these tensions and offer ways to deal with them in practical applications. The school effectiveness knowledge base is offered as a substantive educational frame of references that serves an important function in selecting relevant factors for data collection and the use of the evaluation results.

A Systematic Approach

Educational Evaluation, Assessment and Monitoring

Greetje van der Werf

Hester de Boer

This book examines the global movement of putting more emphasis on students’ social and emotional development in education. It provides some order in the unstructured multitude of desirable socio-emotional educational objectives and ambitions that have resulted from this movement and builds on a careful conceptual analysis. It starts out by examining the roots of the movement and discusses different emphases. Next it makes use of instructional and psychological constructs and theories to arrive at meaningful categorizations of major domains and types of social-emotional “skills”. One of the key assumptions is that social and emotional attributes are malleable by means of educational interventions. The book reviews available research evidence for this assumption, taking into account psychological studies and meta-analyses. It then creates new evidence based on a new meta-analysis, which concentrated on the effects of educational interventions on skills associated with the conscientiousness factor of the Big5 taxonomy. In the final chapter, the book discusses the implications for educational policy and practice; a discussion in which attention is given to political and ethical questions about the desirability of treating social and emotional attributes as educational goals.

Jaap Scheerens

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