Changes in Children’s Cognitive Development at the Start of School in England 2001 – 2008

Since 1997, England has seen massive changes in the Early Years including the introduction of an early childhood curriculum, free pre-school education for three-year-olds and local programmes for disadvantaged communities. Many of these initiatives took time to introduce and become established. Beginning in 2001, and each year thereafter until 2008, the authors collected consistent data from thousands of children when they started school at the age of four on a range of variables, chosen because they are good predictors of later success. These included vocabulary, early reading and early mathematics. Children from the same set of 472 state primary schools in England were assessed each year. This paper contributes to the existing studies of educational trends over time by examining the extent to which children's scores on these measures changed over that period; in general, they were found to have remained stable

Assessing school effects without controlling for prior achievement?

The research findings presented in this paper illustrate how the “value added” of schooling can be assessed empirically using cross-sectional data. Application of the regression-discontinuity approach within a multilevel framework produces both an estimate of the absolute effect of 1 year schooling and an estimate of the variation across schools of this effect. In the study reported here, the approach was applied to both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal dataset. The research findings indicate to what extent different results are produced when cross-sectional as opposed to longitudinal data are analysed

The Tools of Teacher Evaluation: What Should Be Used in Teacher Evaluation from the Teachers’ Perspective

This paper presents a study that was conducted to investigate the tools of teacher evaluation. The focus is on what teachers state about such tools in terms of what should be used when they are evaluated. Teachers were asked by questionnaire about their support of observation, students’ achievement, self-evaluation, peer-evaluation, student evaluation and portfolios. The sample consisted of 599 teachers and heads of departments from nine primary schools in three different educational districts in Kuwait. The most favoured approach was observation, and the least favoured was student evaluation. Nevertheless, the results show that teachers support the use of several tools in their evaluation

Absolute effects of schooling as a reference for the interpretation of educational intervention effects

Knowledge of the absolute effects of schooling provides a useful reference for the interpretation of the effectiveness of educational interventions. We use discontinuities in test scores between the oldest pupils in one birth cohort and the youngest in the next to assess the absolute effects of schooling. Our study includes 90 % of all pupils in year-groups 4–6 of primary education (ages 7–10) in Northern Ireland. Assignment to year-groups is strictly determined by date of birth in Northern Ireland. This creates a situation which parallels randomized controlled experimentation. The findings support the view that the guidelines suggested by Cohen (in 1969) may be overly ambitious when evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions

Breaking the Mould and the Birth of a New Journal: Online Educational Research Journal

Academic journals are evolving and proliferating but despite their success there is much room for improvement. The traditional paper based model is expensive, constrained by space, exclusive and beset with problems of refereeing and publication time. The newer on-line journals go some way to dealing with these issues but they fail to capitalise on the possibilities opened up by the web. This paper launches a new journal Online Educational Research Journal (OERJ) which is free, unconstrained by space and accessible to all. It takes a novel approach to refereeing allowing discussion online and deals with the shortage of refereeing by requiring authors to reciprocate. A key feature of the journal is that papers are guaranteed to be published albeit anonymously in the first instance. After receiving the ratings and comments of referees which will go online the paper becomes onymous unless the author chooses to withdraw

The value-added of primary schools: what is it really measuring?

This paper compares the official value-added scores in 2005 for all primary schools in three adjacent LEAs in England with the raw-score Key Stage 2 results for the same schools. The correlation coefficient for the raw- and value-added scores of these 457 schools is around +0.75. Scatterplots show that there are no low attaining schools with average or higher value-added, and no high attaining schools with below average value-added. At least some of the remaining scatter is explained by the small size of some schools. Although some relationship between these measures is to be expected – so that schools adding considerable value would tend to have high examination outcome scores – the relationship shown is too strong for this explanation to be considered sufficient. Value-added analysis is intended to remove the link between a schools’ intake scores and their raw-score outcomes at KS2. It should lead to an estimate of the differential progress made by pupils, assessed between schools. In fact, however, the relationship between value-added and raw scores is of the same size as the original relationship between intake scores and raw-scores that the value-added is intended to overcome. Therefore, however appealing the calculation of value-added figures is, their development is still at the stage where they are not ready to move from being a research tool to an instrument of judgement on schools. Such figures may mislead parents, governors and teachers and, even more importantly, they are being used in England by OFSTED to pre-determine the results of school inspections