Accelerated School Programmes: Assessing Their Effectiveness

Accelerated School Programmes (ASPs) apply three principles designed to raise schools' effectiveness and to narrow the gap between low-achieving and high achieving students. These principles are: (1) giving the school a unifying purpose or vision; (2) allowing the school greater autonomy in its own management; (3) developing a collaborative approach to teaching, involving teachers, students, parents and the community. This article examines the effectiveness of ASPs on the basis of a study of four comprehensive schools in Israel. While the size of the sample is small, the positive results indicate that similar research on a wider scale would be valuable in shaping future educational policy.     

New Directions for School Effectiveness Research: Towards School Effectiveness Without Schools

School effectiveness research has made a number of valuable contributions to educational research over the past three decades. However, its validity is threatened by a number of evolutions that question the continuing centrality of its basic research object, the public school. Moves towards more flexible school organization such as networks of schools, a broader role for schools reconceptualized as community centers, the emergence of new providers outwith the public sector, the increasingly internationalised nature of research and moves towards greater use of distance learning and home schooling all mean that this focus may rapidly become outdated, potentially making school effectiveness research irrelevant.In this paper we will discuss the consequences of these evolutions for school effectiveness research and argue that, rather than lessening the need for effectiveness research, they increase the imperative for this type of research, as long as it is broadened to educational effectiveness in its broadest sense whether it takes place in the traditional public school or not, and is conducted in an empirical and open-minded way.     

School Effectiveness and School Improvement: Sustaining Links

Ideally, school effectiveness research and school improvement might have a relationship with a surplus value for both. In reality, this relationship is often troublesome. Some problems can be attributed to the intrinsic differences between effectiveness and improvement, such as different missions. However, an analysis of the current situation in effectiveness and improvement shows that there are many possibilities at all stages of research studies and improvement projects for a more fruitful relationship. In this article, stronger links between effectiveness and improvement are advocated. Such links can be achieved by better‐guided processes of application and reconstruction of knowledge during effectiveness research and improvement. These processes, illustrated by some successful projects which have started recently, are described under the heading of sustained interactivity.     

School Effectiveness and Effectiveness Indicators

In spite of continuing investigations, researchers have yet to satisfy practitioners, policy‐makers and the international research community about production of a defensible collection of important indicators for gauging school effectiveness. The research project described in this article had four major purposes: (a) to investigate and compare the perceptions of principals, teachers and area superintendents about the overall effectiveness of schools and effectiveness on specific dimensions; (b) to assess and compare the perceptions of these educators about the importance of the specific dimensions for overall effectiveness; (c) to assess the association between principals’ perceptions of effectiveness on, and importance, of these dimensions; and (d) to probe school‐level differences about the two types of organizations. Perceptual data were obtained from elementary and junior high school principals throughout Alberta, Canada, as well as from teachers and area superintendents in one major city. Schools were rated as most effective in maintaining an appropriate school climate, while the most important dimensions involved climate (elementary), and morale, climate and acknowledging achievements (junior high). Factor analysis produced eight underlying indicators, but it also demonstrated the complexity of the effectiveness construct. Comparisons of effectiveness and importance highlighted some important but least effective areas, such as encouraging academic success and maximizing staff satisfaction. Practical and research implications are elucidated.     

School Effectiveness and School Attendance

ABSTRACT

Given that the British Government is proposing to require all schools to provide the Secretary of State with details of, amongst other things, their respective truancy rates, this article sets out to demonstrate that attendance figures, as well as examination results, should be modified before publication. It reports on a study involving 5,429 pupils in their final year of primary education attending 138 junior/primary schools in a single authority in Wales and utilises child, home and school data.     

Redefining School Effectiveness

This article examines some of the effects of the focus of school effectiveness research on the single variable of examination success. It considers the English political context within which the use of this indicator has developed and argues that such a focus has caused considerable harm. Finally, it emphasises the need for researchers to develop and use a greater variety of measures of school effectiveness.     

Assessing School Choice: A balanced perspective

This article attempts to address the potential advantages and disadvantages of school choice. The author describes why school choice is attractive to parents, but raises concerns among educators. The extent to which choice programmes in the UK and the US attempt to allay these concerns is addressed. The author asserts that there is a dearth of research material adequately testing the effects of choice on academic achievement. He further claims that the nationwide data sets used by researchers probably fail to test whether school choice really enhances the academic achievement of the participants. While the author has doubts about how widespread an effect school choice can have, he believes further research is necessary before one can objectively evaluate the potential benefits that school choice can produce.     

Performance Funding Programs: Assessing Their Stability

State programs of performance funding for public colleges and universities are both popular and volatile. A previous article identified some characteristics of stable programs by comparing the survey responses of state and campus leaders from Tennessee and Missouri about their mature programs with those from four states that later dropped performance funding. This article uses those characteristics to assess the stability of the continuing programs in Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina. This article compares the survey responses of state and campus leaders from each of these three states about their programs with those from Missouri and Tennessee. The findings suggest trouble for these three programs, for they share few of the characteristics common to the stable programs in Missouri and Tennessee.     

School to Work Programmes and the Production of Alienation

Since the late 1970s it has become generally accepted among British politicians that the transition of young people from school to work is a problematic process. The major response to this at the level of the school has been a proliferation of national and local vocationally oriented courses designed to ease this situation through creating a ‘permanent bridge’ to the labour market.

This paper is an examination of a course which constitutes a central part of one of these schemes, the Schools Vocational Programme. It suggests that far from facilitating transfer from school to work, industrially oriented education may have the unintended consequence of alienating young people from sectors of waged‐labour in the capitalist economy.     

学校效能研究与学校重建

追求学校教育质量与效能是当今世界各国基础教育改革的核心要旨.学校效能研究从揭示学校对学生的成就影响开始,其间经历有效学校运动到学校改进运动,其目的是改进学校,使学校成为有效能的学校.学校效能研究在40年的发展过程中在方法论上不断革新,试图揭示学校效能的因素,在实践层面为政府以及学校重建提供理论指引;同时学校效能研究面临着政治化、专门化和技术化问题,问题的解决有待于研究的进一步深化.     

学校效能:职业学校评价的新视角

对学校效能理论的起源及发展,学校效能的内涵、特征及功能等问题进行梳理,在此基础上提出以学校效能理论为基础,构建职校效能理论,评价职业学校效能的观点。认为将学校效能理论应用于职业学校评价,研究职业学校教育净影响所产生的增值情况,对于科学分析、评价职业学校具有重要意义。     

美国加速学校研究

加速学校是美国学校整体改革的模式之一,起源于20世纪80年代,目的是使义务教育阶段处境困难的学生回归教育的主流。它奉行目标一致、赋权承责和发挥所长三个原则,实行参与式的管理制度,为所有的学生提供有效的学习体验。对它的研究可以为中国的类似教育现象提供一些有益启示。     

School Culture,School Effectiveness and School Improvement

The relevance of the concept of culture to school effectiveness and school improvement is explored. Two typologies are developed. The first proposes four ‘ideal type’ school cultures, based on two underlying domains; the second, a more elaborate and dynamic model, proposes two ‘ideal type’ school cultures, based on five underlying structures. Each is discussed for its heuristic, conceptual, methodological and explanatory potential in research in the fields of school effectiveness and school improvement. In distinguishing collegial cultures from collaborative styles, the article advances recent writing on collaboration. From the theory hypotheses about the relationship between school culture and school effectiveness and improvement can be derived as well as techniques to test such hypotheses.     

Interactive Multimedia Instruction Versus Traditional Training Programmes: Analysis of their Effectiveness and Perception

Abstract

In this article, the practicability of introduction of computer multimedia as an educational tool was compared with the traditional approach for training sugarcane growers in ratoon management practices in three villages of Tamil Nadu state, India using pre-test, post-test control group experimental design.

A CD-ROM was developed as a multimedia resource to support the training process using Macromedia Flash as the authorware. Three modes of message delivery—traditional lecture alone, lecture followed by multimedia and multimedia alone were analyzed for their effectiveness in terms of knowledge gain, learning index and extent of adoption. The group which was exposed to lecture followed by multimedia had better knowledge gain and learning index. Farmers perceived that the use of different multimedia building blocks made it an interesting and educative tool. The message, when given through lecture alone was perceived as boring and monotonous with limited attention span. The extent of adoption of ratoon management practices was almost on par; however the group which had received instructions through lecture followed by computer multimedia had a better adoption rate. Such a comparative analysis is an opportunity for a better understanding of the role that multimedia could play in technology transfer to farmers.     

School Effectiveness Indices Revisited: Cross-Year Stability

School effectiveness indices (SEIs) based on residuals from regressing test performance onto prior test performance and a socioeconomic status (SES) measure were obtained for 2 consecutive years for 431 elementary schools. The resulting SEIs were found to be reasonably stable year to year, the correlations ranging from. 34 to .66, depending on grade level (1–4) and subject (reading and mathematics). To aid in the identification of the factors that affect the stability of school achievement, correlations of the SEIs across subjects and grade levels were obtained also. It was determined that SEIs reflecting the performance of students at the same grade level were relatively stable, whether the same or different students were involved. However, SEIs reflecting the performance of students at different grade levels were very unstable. This suggests that grade-within-school effects dominate whatever global school effects operate in elementary schools. Implications for effective schools research, the design of school recognition/reward programs, and research and measurement specialists in general are discussed     

Assessing the Teaching Quality of Accounting Programmes: An evaluation of the Course Experience Questionnaire

In recent years, measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of higher edu cation has become a major issue. National governments are now demanding greater public accountability for funds invested in the sector, resulting in the emergence of various performance indicators relating to both teaching and research. The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) was developed to measure the perceived quality of teaching in degree programmes. It evolved from research that identified curriculum, teaching and assessment as key determinants of students' approaches to learning and, in turn, the quality of their learning outcomes. The CEQ data are intended for use in making comparisons within fields of study over time and/or across institutions. However, no European study has reported on its suitability to evaluate teaching within an accounting programme. This paper outlines the development of the CEQ and confirms its reliability and construct validity for use in the accounting discipline in an Irish context.