Word Class Schools

World Class Schools : Some Preliminary Methodological Findings from The International School Effectiveness Research Project (ISERP)

Introduction : The Rationale for the Study Recent years have seen a greatly enhanced interest within educational research in issues of a ‘comparative’ nature. In most fields, there is an enhanced

internationalisation evident in the increasingly internationalattendance at the conferences of educational ‘specialties’ and in the acceptance of the importance of ‘nation’ as a contextual variable of importance.

The reasons for this internationalisation have been fully dealt with elsewhere (Reynolds and Farrell, 1996; Reynolds et al, 1994) but briefly can be related to the ease with which ideas, both practical and conceptual, can now be spread throughoutthe world by information technology, and to the pressures that are being put upon national educational systems to maximise pupil outcomes by searching out and utilising effective practices from anywhere in the world that they may exist.

In this situation, the pressure upon the discipline of comparative education to resource this increasingly internationalised discourse has been growing, yet thediscipline itself has been seemingly on an intellectual plateau for perhaps two decades. Much of the discipline appears to be simply descriptive, with little attempt to generate any theoretical underpinnings. There have additionally been

‘macrolevel’ attempts to generate theoretical understandings but these appear to be without empirical foundation. When there are discussions about educationalpolicies in this literature, there is usually an assumption that the policies have the effects that their policymakers assume, a very dangerous assumption to hold! Perhaps most importantly, the conventional absence of any dependent variable internationally, across countries, against which to assess the various influences of the independent

variables, makes analysis of the causal factors thatdetermine the nature of countries’ educational systems very difficult. There has been, of course, an additional body of knowledge to resource the international discussion of education increasingly taking place, and that is the cross national achievement surveys undertaken by the IEA and similar organisations, such as the recent Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (Keys, Harrisand Fernandes, 1996). However, although they have the intellectual

advantage of being able to compare countries on a common dependent variable or metric of achievement scores, the paradigm that the achievement surveys work within seems to be deficient in many important aspects:

(1)

these studies usually utilise cross-sectional samples of students, rather than following cohorts ofstudents over time through longitudinal research designs;

(2)

the samples of students from countries are sometimes not representative of the entire populations of students in those countries, which is especially the case when specific geographic or political regions are chosen to represent an entire country;

(3)

operational definitions of sampling “levels” may vary across countries; forexample, what constitutes third grade in one country may not be the same in another;

(4)

materials may not be translated the same across countries, thus resulting in reliability and validity problems;

(5)

the cross-country reliability and validity of surveys and questionnaires may be suspect, since the constructs that they measure may be different in divergent cultural contexts; forexample, Purves (1992) concluded that written 2

composition must be interpreted within a cultural context, not as a general cognitive ability;

(6)

there are difficulties in designing tests which adequately sample the curricula delivered in several countries.

Other criticisms of these international educational surveys address a different set of issues related to a perceived need for more...