Extending Educational Effectiveness: A Critical Review of Research Approaches in International Effectiveness Research, and Proposals to Improve Them

A review is given of internationally orientated educational effectiveness research over time, looking at the waves of studies from 1960 to 2001, the beginning of the PISA studies. It is concluded that whilst PISA has been a major methodological improvement upon earlier work, there are issues to do with the ‘culture fairness’ of test items, OECD misrepresenting of its own work, sampling adequacy and manipulation of samples by some governments. It is argued that educational effectiveness and improvement research can provide useful perspectives for international effectiveness research in terms of its focus upon pedagogy/teaching, its value-added approach, its often-longitudinal design, its use of ‘supply side’ as well as ‘demand side’ policy variables and its use of ‘efficiency’ as well as ‘effectiveness’ measures. It is also argued that the cultural and contextual factors/features of societies would additionally require study. It is finally argued that high quality international comparative work may help in the generation of more useful educational effectiveness research, particularly in the generation of more valid, sensitive context specific formulations.