ABSTRACT
School Effectiveness Research (SER) has emerged from virtual total obscurity to a now-central position in the educational discourse that is taking place within many countries. From the position 30 years ago that ‘schools make no difference’ that was assumed to be the conclusions of the Coleman et al. (1966) and Jencks et al. (1972) studies, there is now a widespread assumption internationally that schools affect children's development, that there are observable regularities in the schools that ‘add value’, and that the task of educational policies is to improve all schools in general and the more ineffective schools in particular by transmission of this knowledge to educational practitioners. Overall, there have been three major strands of SER:
School Effects Research, which is studies of the scientific properties of school effects evolving from input-output studies to current research utilising multilevel models;
Effective Schools Research which is research concerned with the processes of effective schooling, evolving from case studies of outlier schools through to contemporary studies merging qualitative and quantitative methods in the simultaneous study of the class and the school;
School Improvement Research, which examines the processes whereby schools can be changed, utilising increasingly sophisticated models that have gone beyond simple applications of school effectiveness knowledge to sophisticated ‘multiple-lever’ models.
