ABSTRACT
Over the last thirty years or more school effectiveness research (SER) has emerged as a fast growing and dynamic field of study with a growing international profile (Scheerens and Bosker, 1997; Mortimore, 1998; Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000; Muijs, 2006; Sammons, 2006a and 2006b, 2007; Van Damme et al., 2006; Townsend, 2007; Creemers and Kyriakides, 2008; Creemers et al., 2010) that explicitly focuses on studying the variation between schools, departments and teachers in their effects on students’ outcomes and the school and classroom processes that seem to support better outcomes. In addition to the study of school and, more recently, of teacher or class level effects and attempts to delineate the characteristics of effective schools and effective teaching (Muijs and Reynolds, 2010; Ko and Sammons, 2011), the field is now paying greater attention to contextual influences including the role of local authorities and school districts, for example (Tymms et al., 2008; Reynolds et al., 2011) and the role of comparative studies in different international contexts (Reynolds et al., 2002; Teddlie et al. 2006; Van de Grift et al., 2007). Moreover, SER-type studies of institutional effects are also addressing other areas of education including pre-school settings and nurseries ( Sammons et al., 2008; Melhuish et al., 2008 ; Sylva et al., 2010), and colleges and higher education settings that serve students who are beyond the compulsory school leaving age. Given these developments the term educational effectiveness research (EER) is becoming increasingly used (Muijs, 2006; Creemers et al., 2010; Reynolds, 2010; Teddlie, 2010). This is a more appropriate description because it recognizes the broader remit of recent research (Creemers and Kyriakides, 2008) and a wider focus of enquiry than just the study of the effects of individual schools. For example, there is an increasing interest in the way EER can promote school improvement (Stringfield et al., 2008a) using the evidence base from High Reliability Schools research and can be used to evaluate educational initiatives, for example in England the introduction of Federations (Lindsay et al., 2007).
