In 1999, after a series of far-reaching reforms aiming at decentralisation, deregulation and increased local autonomy in Swedish education, the Government decided to introduce a five-year experiment, which would develop these reform efforts even further. Even though Swedish compulsory schools already were the most autonomous in Europe with regard…

This article critically explores how a new form of European Union (EU) governance--the open method of coordination (OMC)--impinges on education policies. The first part discusses three key characteristics of the OMC, in particular its flexibility, reflexivity and reliance on the techniques of new public management. It also outlines briefly why the…

At the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2006 in Geneva, Switzerland, the EERJ Roundtable focused upon the relationships between information, research and intervention. These relationships could be understood as a circular flow of decontextualising and recontextualising terms, concepts or "knowledge" according to the respective…

This article reports on methodological approaches to evaluate the relevance and quality of educational research publications. In the first section it focuses on the ISI Social Science Citation Index and shows that this standard instrument for bibliometric measurement is insufficient for the representation of European educational research. In the…

This article reports on the results of an intensive summer course in which a community of learners, consisting of three teaching and teacher education academics and 17 European PhD students in the field of education, conducted a collective self-study. The international collective self-study offered a unique opportunity to go beyond parochial and…

The WIFO Gateway to Research on Education in Europe (http://www.wifo-gate.org) is an Internet portal focusing on vocational education and training and human resource development. Launched 10 years ago by the Research Forum Education and Society (Wissenschaftsforum Bildung und Gesellschaft-WIFO) Berlin, it has developed in several stages in close…

In recent years, the ongoing development towards a knowledge-based society--associated with globalization, an aging population, new technologies and organizational changes--has led to a more intensive analysis of education and learning throughout life with regard to quantitative, qualitative and financial aspects. In this framework, education…

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study conducted by the author on the implications of e-learning programmes for the higher education systems of the member states of the European Union. The study takes a look behind the scenes of the eLearning Programme and other e-learning actions within other European programmes by tapping into…

In this article, the authors explore if and how knowledge communities have the potential to help improve the communal efforts of practitioners, intermediaries and researchers to change education. An explorative study was conducted with a survey that was distributed among 187 workers in the Dutch educational field to investigate if and how…

In the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is an international comparative learning assessment measuring young people's knowledge and skills, Finland has been ranked at the top in the two rounds conducted and reported so far. In this article, the authors examine the discourses within which Finland's PISA results have been…

The purpose of this article is to address the question of "Pedagogik" as an academic discipline in Sweden based on a social study of the science's point of departure. The philosophical and epistemological issues which constitute the conceptual questions about the nature and content of educational science are, although crucial, peripheral to this…

This article explores the mechanisms of educational pathway decision making at the transition from primary to secondary school in the German education system by analysing data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The highly reliable data of the German sample of the 2001 PIRLS make it possible to take into…

The school system is a green pasture for inexhaustible investigations for the purpose of enhancing academic achievement. The reason is that factors and variables within the confines of educational activities appear also to be inexhaustible. One such factor that attracted an investigation is "administrative stress" as it affects secondary school…

This review presents an overview of selected articles on the leniency hypothesis: the idea that students give higher evaluations to instructors who grade more leniently. Such articles comprise a small subset of the voluminous research on student evaluations of teaching (SETs). In this diverse literature, research methods and aims have frequently…

This article examines the effects of the leadership style of the principal, "transformational leadership and transactional leadership", along with teachers' job satisfaction on schools' organizational health. Specifically speaking, it investigates to what extent the variations in school health can be related to the principal's leadership style and…