This paper argues that the dynamic model of educational effectiveness can be used to establish stronger links between educational effectiveness research (EER) and school improvement. It provides research evidence to support the validity of the model. Thus, the importance of using the dynamic model to establish an evidence-based and theory-driven…

"New" school inspections are essential parts of "evidence-based governance" concepts and have been implemented by many European countries as a major strategy to assure and improve the effectiveness and quality of their education systems. However, national inspection systems vary in their composition and in their contextual…

This study uses a school-level longitudinal control-group design to examine how teachers and principals of inspected versus uninspected schools perceive school improvement at their schools. During the phasing in of school inspections in the states of Berlin and Brandenburg (Germany), both inspected and uninspected schools were surveyed with…

The learning gains in reading of students in 57 classrooms in special primary education doubled as a result of implementing the Reading Impulse in Special Education (RISE) programme. Raising the scheduled reading time with 1.5 hr in all classrooms and implementing standards-based teaching characterised by "monitoring of pupil progress",…

This paper illustrates how high-quality preschool has the potential to serve as an intervention within normal populations. Although it is well known that targeted Early Interventions can protect the development of young children from developmental risks, there remains less evidence concerning universal preschool education. To address this…

The Effective Pre-school Provision in Northern Ireland (EPPNI) project is a longitudinal study of child development from 3 to 11 years. It is one of the first large-scale UK projects to investigate the effects of different kinds of preschool provision, and to relate experience in preschool to child development. In EPPNI, 683 children were randomly…

Few studies have investigated how preschool and primary school interact to influence children's cognitive development. The present investigation explores German children's numeracy skills between age 3 (1st year of preschool) and age 7 (1st year of primary school). We first identified the influence of preschool experience on development while…

Shortcomings of educational quality in rural schools remain a key focus in the literature related to developing countries. This paper studies whether rural primary schools in Malaysia, an upper middle-income developing country, are still experiencing lower levels of educational resources, school climate, school leadership, and parental involvement…

School inspections are expected to have an impact on data use and improvement of schools. Schools are expected to generate data (e.g., self-evaluation reports and student achievement results) as part of the inspection process. This process, in turn, also generates data (e.g., inspection reports) for school improvement. The high-stakes context in…

Beginning with a discussion of the latest findings in the information and communication technologies (ICT) and educational improvement field, this article develops a comprehensive strategy to analyse online community building. Far from offering a utopian or dystopian vision, we study the contribution of ICT appropriation as a tool for…

There is persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between school decline and changes in school demographics. Using a population of 981 (N = 981) elementary schools, the authors identified samples of declining schools: Relational Decline (n = 510), Absolute Decline (n = 217), and Crossing the Line (n = 165). Latent growth models assessed…

This paper investigates the extent to which changes in the effectiveness status of schools can be related to changes in the functioning of school factors included in the dynamic model of educational effectiveness. The methods of a follow-up study were identical to those of a study conducted 4 years ago in order to test the validity of the dynamic…

The "mushrooming" of private schools for low-income families has been widely noted in the literature; however, very little is known about the quality of these schools. This research explored the relative quality of private unaided (recognised and unrecognised) and government schools in low-income areas of Hyderabad, India. A preliminary census to…

The implementation of standards-based accountability (SBA) interventions aimed at improving school performance often focuses on the testing component, at the expense of capacity building. This was the case in South Africa when a SBA programme was instituted by government in 2000, which was accompanied by substantial rises in senior certificate…