Following Snow's (1973) description of an "inductive" process of theory formation, this article addresses the organization of the knowledge base on school effectiveness. A multilevel presentation stimulated the conceptualization of educational effectiveness as an integration of system-level, school-level, and classroom-level…

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…

The main objective of this study was to quantify the impact of failing to account for measurement error on school compositional effects. Multilevel structural equation models were incorporated to control for measurement error and/or sampling error. Study 1, a large sample of English primary students in Years 1 and 4, revealed a significantly…

This project investigates the impact of the dynamic approach to school improvement (DASI) aiming to help schools face and reduce bullying through integrating research on bullying with educational effectiveness research (EER). A network of approximately 15 schools in each participating country (i.e., Belgium, Cyprus, England, Greece, and The…

Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances,…

One of the key findings from decades of educational effectiveness research is the importance of the classroom level as a predictor of pupil outcomes. In this review, we therefore look at synthesising our best evidence from research on effective teaching, and its corollary, teacher development. In the 1st section, we will look at key findings from…

Over the last 4 decades, the school effectiveness and school improvement research bases have gained prominence and recognition on the international stage. In both a theoretical and empirical sense, they have matured through a wide range of well-documented projects, interventions, and innovations across a range of countries, describing how efforts…

In this commentary, the 3 review papers by Reynolds et al. (this issue), Muijs et al. (this issue), and Hopkins, Stringfield, Harris, Stoll, and Mackay (this issue) on "educational effectiveness", "teaching effectiveness", and "school and system improvement" are discussed. In the text, the 3 papers are occasionally…

In educational effectiveness research, it frequently has proven difficult to make credible inferences about cause and effect relations. The article first identifies the main categories of threats to valid causal inference from observational data, and discusses designs and analytic approaches which protect against them. With the use of data from 22…

From an international review of 109 school effectiveness research studies, only 6 could be seen as theory driven. As the border between substantive conceptual models of educational effectiveness and theory-based models is not always very sharp, this number might be increased to 11 by including those studies that are based on models that make…

This article summarises findings from systematic reviews of research on primary and secondary mathematics, primary and secondary reading, and programmes for struggling readers. All reviews used a common set of procedures, requiring comparisons with control groups and duration of at least 12 weeks. Across hundreds of qualifying studies, a clear…

In the United States, effective data use is proving to be a vexing problem. In response, scholars have recently begun viewing this as a systemic problem, believing there are actions a school district may take to make data use more efficient and tenable throughout the organization. In this article, we add to the knowledge of how school…

This article reviews the literature on Chinese principalship written in English and Chinese between 1998 and 2008. The first sections discuss the rationale for the research, the review process, and the state of education research in mainland China. The review findings are presented as a set of core patterns and contributory subpatterns, which flow…

The study presented here is an elaboration on recent educational effectiveness research focusing on long-term school effects. Central in this study is the approach to teaching at secondary schools and its relation to student perception of the fit between school and university and 1st-year academic achievement. Based on previous research, a coding…

In this paper, I consider the importance of the work of Bert Creemers to my own work and the field of educational effectiveness. In particular, the field needs to take heed of 3 key lessons from Bert Creemers' work: the importance of an empirical and sceptical stance focussed on what actually works in education, the primacy of the classroom level…