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 ...

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 a...

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 som...

This book analyzes the productivity and effectiveness of a variety of time investments in education. It explores the methods used in education to optimize the time that students are exposed to learning content. Such methods include expanding official school time, optimizing “time on task”, providing homework assignments, and creating learning opportunities beyond lesson hours. The book presents a review of earlier reviews and meta-analyses, secondary analyses of international data sets, an...

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.Alig...

This book provides a thorough review of the research literature on the effect of school size in primary and secondary education on three types of outcomes: student achievement, non-cognitive outcomes and costs per student. Based on 84 scientific publications and several prior reviews, the book discusses four main areas: the impact of school size on cognitive learning outcomes and non-cognitive outcomes; the "state of the art" of empirical research on economies of size; the direct and indir...

The quality of education is a term that is frequently used in public debates. Understood in the sense of education being “generally okay” , or rather, most frequently, as “not okay”. Perhaps there is an overruling nostalgic view that formerly education was better than today. In scholarly discourse there are those who maintain that the quality of education is an illusive term, with varying interpretations in different settings and by different stakeholders.In this book the complexit...

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 co...

This book explores the philosophical, ideological and practical dimensions of curriculum using an intercultural lens. It is cross-cultural, comparative and inclusive, with each chapter featuring case studies from a minimum of three countries across different continents. By using the same methods of data collection and analysis for each country level in each chapter, the text explores relationships of curriculum theory, policy and practice both within and between countries. A diverse range ...

Through innovative analysis of theory and practice, this book offers refreshing critical perspectives on service-learning in higher education. It constructs a theoretical paradigm for service-learning which extends to critical pedagogy, and investigates critical reflection and academic reflective writing, supported throughout by empirical evidence.

Recent advances in the scientific understanding of the human mind and brain along with the emphases on evidence-based practice and competency-based education are creating increasing pressures to update some of the traditional approaches to structuring and organizing education and practice in the field. There have also been many calls in recent years for a unified approach to conceptualizing professional practice in psychology. This book examines whether there exists a unified conceptual fr...

Medical competence is a hot topic surrounded by much controversy about how to define competency, how to teach it, and how to measure it. While some debate the pros and cons of competence-based medical education and others explain how to achieve various competencies, the authors of the seven chapters in The Question of Competence offer something very different. They critique the very notion of competence itself and attend to how it has shaped what we pay attention ...