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.

Improving quality and equity in schools in socially disadvantaged areas

Background: Recent effectiveness studies have investigated the relationship between two dimensions of effectiveness - namely, quality and equity. Specifically, the question of whether effective schools can also reduce the initial differences in student outcomes attributed to student background factors has been examined. In this context, the Dynamic Approach to School Improvement (DASI) makes use of theory and the research findings of effectiveness studies to try to improve school effectiveness in terms of quality and equity. Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether the implementation of DASI in primary schools in socially disadvantaged areas in four European countries (Cyprus, England, Greece and Ireland) was able to promote student learning outcomes in mathematics and to reduce the impact of student background factors on student achievement in mathematics. Design and methods: A sample of 72 primary schools across the four countries was randomly split into experimental and control groups. At the beginning and at the end of the school year, mathematics tests were administered to all students of Grades 4-6 (n = 5560; student ages 9-12 years). The experimental group made use of DASI. Within-country multilevel regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the impact of the intervention and search for interaction effects between the use of DASI and student background factors on final achievement. Results: In each country, the experimental group achieved better results in mathematics than the control group. At the beginning of the intervention, the achievement gap based on socio-economic status (SES) was equally large in the experimental and the control groups. Only in the experimental group did the achievement gap based on SES become smaller. However, DASI was not found to have an effect on equity when the equity dimension was examined by focusing on the achievement gap based on either gender or ethnicity. Conclusions: Implications of findings are drawn and the importance of measuring equity in terms of student achievement gaps based on different background factors, rather than only on SES, is emphasised. We propose the evaluation of the impact of interventions on promoting equity by the use of various criteria