The article is a critical sociological analysis of current transnational practices on creating comparable measurements of dropout and completion in higher education and the consequences for the conditions of scientific knowledge production on the topic. The analysis revolves around questions of epistemological, methodological and symbolic types…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare recent research papers on foreign language education in Turkish context with those published in international context to shed light on researchers and policy makers for future studies. This study filled a gap in this field and also aimed to increase the rate of acceptance of research papers…

The last decades have seen the completion of an increasing number of qualitative comparative research projects on teaching. Challenges and benefits which might arise from a qualitative international comparative research design have been considered. However, very little has been published on challenges and benefits which may arise from using…

The article discusses comparative organizational studies, focusing on change in higher education institutions, and in particular (but not only) on studies that compare organizations in different national settings. It first presents and discusses different approaches to comparison based on a couple of typologies that have been developed to identify…

Despite the value of the comparative perspective for the study of higher education is widely recognised, there is little consensus about the specific methodological approaches. Quantitative tools outlined their relevance for addressing comparative analyses since they are supposed to reducing the complexity, finding out and graduating similarities…

Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a quest to achieve a "world class" education system through a process of identifying and adopting the practices of those systems whose pupils perform best in league tables of achievement. This is the rationale for the range of new policies proposed by the coalition government in the schools…

This paper re-considers some of the evidence for low and declining social mobility in Britain, showing that one study based on a re-analysis of cohort figures appears to have had an impact on policy-makers out of all proportion to its scale and rigor. The study claimed to show that the income of parents and children were more closely related for…

This article is a reflection on an area of particular interest in the current research environment, but which has not yet been explored satisfactorily in the education literature: the evaluation of educational research. The particular focus is on the UK context, but the article is informed by comparative evidence from six countries (gathered…

Asserting that the development of educational theory requires scientific study based on comparative data, the author analyzes the objections to data comparison between societies and finds this to be a nonissue. This is the Presidential Address, delivered to the Comparative and International Education Society, Mexico City, March 1978. (SJL)

This article discusses some of the methodological problems involved in determining indices for the level of education in the Soviet Union. (KM)

This article explores some of the conceptual and strategic problems of truly comparative research. Addressing the study of national educational policies, the author considers the uses of theory in defining units of analysis and compares the costs and utility of research strategies based on differing compositions within the research team.…

This letter is written in response to Joseph P. Farrell's article (Comparative Education Review 23, February 1979), "The Necessity of Comparisons in the Study of Education." It raises doubts about the possibility of an exact science of education because education is based in the humanities. (KC)

Analyzes the concept of comparison as a methodological problem in cross-cultural studies and comparative education. Outlines five types of relationships that rely on equivalence or comparability. Discusses the questions of whether the concepts under comparison correspond, how to measure correspondence, and how to resolve linguistic difficulties.…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

This paper inquires analytically about the connotative meaning of the terms poverty and learning as they function in the language of comparative education research. In the analysis of concepts, the analytical techniques used are the techniques of definition, explication, illustration, and substitution. Four conceptions of the term learning and…