Teacher effectiveness, which impacts student attainment even when controlling for student characteristics, is of key importance as a factor in educational effectiveness and improvement. Improving the quality of teaching is thus the primary means by which we can enhance student learning outcomes. Thus there has long been great interest in the…

Tests an educational-effectiveness model by reanalyzing a large-scale dataset containing (Dutch) elementary school data of subsequent student cohorts, their teachers, and their schools. Researchers found some expected positive achievement effects of individual classroom and school factors, but these were unstable across school subjects and student…

Criticizes the current status of school-level factors as they appear in research reviews and in school-effectiveness models, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. Argues that most studies do not investigate factors at the classroom level. Outlines a theoretical basis for these factors based on learning theories and instruction…

The Netherlands has a flourishing, quantitatively sophisticated effectiveness research base that seems relatively unused within practice and abused by the political sphere. Dutch studies evince context specificity (while failing to replicate some validated school-effectiveness factors), sophisticated theoretical formulation, multiple-level…

Unfortunately, the relationship between school-effectiveness research and school improvement is troublesome. This article explores and advocates a stronger linkage between effectiveness and improvement. Such links may be achieved by better-guided processes of application and knowledge reconstruction during effectiveness research and improvement.…

School-effectiveness research (SER) has an instrumental orientation. Although critics claim otherwise, SER researchers usually consider students'"innate" background characteristics when studying schools. Theory formation, foundational issues, and research viability are being addressed. The field is definitely alive and kicking, despite…

Research on school effectiveness has shown that schools differ in regard to outcomes of comparable groups of students. Some schools are found to be more effective than others and these more effective schools have identifiable characteristics that help them excel. Outcomes measured to determine educational effectiveness include basic skills and…

To better conceptualize educational effectiveness, a comprehensive model (Creemers 1994) that takes as a point of departure the differences in the learning results of students was developed. To explain the differences in outcomes, this paper introduces more formal characteristics--consistency, cohesion, constancy, and control--for effectiveness in…

This paper presents findings of a study, conducted by the International School Effectiveness Research Programme (ISERP), that examined school effectiveness in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Data were analyzed at several levels: (1) at the individual level (student…