Educational effectiveness and improvement in developing societies. Some experiences from the Primary Education Quality Improvement Project in Indonesia

The improvement of education in developing societies might benefit from theory and research on educational effectiveness. ... The research evidence points at the importance of factors at the classroom level and the relatively small possibilities that the school and the above school level have to influence those factors at the classroom level. This is illustrated by the evaluation of the primary education quality improvement project in Indonesia, a project that aimed at the improvement of education through teacher professional development, provision of textbooks, community participation and management of schools. The results tend to support the general feeling about educational effectiveness. Conclusions stress the importance of the development of knowledge by (inter)national consultants, the content of the intervention - educational effectiveness and improvement and the adaptation of the knowledge to national and local circumstances - and procedural and technical knowledge how to design, implement and evaluate educational interventions. (DIPF/orig.

Conceptualizing school effectiveness

The theoretical status of existing school effectiveness models is analyzed by using perspectives from organizational theory and models of classroom effectiveness. This leads to the formulation of a basic framework for conceptualizing school effectiveness that includes variables at the levels of the school, the context of the school and the classroom, while background variables of pupils are also taken into account. One of the conclusions is that hypothesis construction and empirical research on cross-level relationships within this basic framework are of central importance to enhance our understanding of school effectiveness

Developments in the educational effectiveness research programme

Educational effectiveness as a research programme moved from an input-output paradigm to an input-process-output paradigm and, in view of the fact that so-called contextual school effectiveness is gaining in importance, this might be more properly termed a context-input-process-output-based approach. The aim of this introductory chapter is to put the state of the art of educational effectiveness research into perspective by summarizing the most important developments in output measurement, the identification of relevant input-, process- and contextual conditions and the causal modeling of these categories. Specific consideration is given to the improvement of substantive multi-level models of educational effectiveness and to available theories that could help to reveal the explanatory mechanisms behind these models

Political and organizational influences on middle school evaluations

Middle school evaluations provide a case in point when the influence of political and organizational contextual conditions on evaluations is considered. This is illustrated by means of a description of the experiences with the middle school evaluation in the Netherlands and a brief sketch of the context of similar evaluations in Western Germany, England, Wales, France and Sweden. Several conclusions about favourable and unfavourable contextual conditions are drawn and some conditions concerning the future of middle school evaluations are discussed

Students' Perspective on the Impact of English Teacher Development Programs on Teaching Quality in Indonesia

Finding effective methods for improving teaching quality is crucial because it has been found to be the most important factor in education. This paper compares two approaches of improving teaching quality through a one-year experimental study involving two experimental groups and one control group. The first is the use of education standards and the second is the use of education standards combined with a teacher development program. Teaching quality was measured in four variables: Building classroom as a learning environment (CLE), instruction, questioning, and orientation. In this study, 1255 students and 45 teachers from 43 junior secondary schools in two provinces of Indonesia voluntarily participated. Multilevel modelling was employed and the results indicate that both interventions have significant effects on the outcomes. However, as expected, the second intervention is significant in all variables and has larger effects, whereas the first intervention is significant only in two variables: CLE and questioning. The findings of this research imply the need to have clear and concrete education standards and to enhance these education standards with training sessions to facilitate better teaching quality.</p