The fifth phase of Educational Effectiveness Research: The philosophy and measurement of equity

Abstract

Educational Effectiveness Research (EER) investigates, and seeks to explain, the causal relationships in formal school settings between on the one hand outcomes (both academic-cognitive and educational-affective) and on the other, inputs (student intake characteristics such as social background and prior attainment). Of course, ratios of output-to-input are simply measures of efficiency, not effectiveness, but EER goes beyond this to look at the educative processes between inputs and outputs and the policy context in which these processes are set, and this is what justifies ‘effectiveness’ in the nomenclature. Recently there has been a certain nervousness within the field about the formality of the institutional setting within the EER paradigm - usually schools but more recently pre-schools and colleges of further education – and this has manifested itself in a desire to be more inclusive in how the field is defined, as if the mere fact of blurring the boundaries of the discipline will meet some higher social aspiration. The practical reality remains that usually only formal systems collect the kind of empirical data that underpins EER methodologies and enables modelling to take place at the level of the pupil, the teacher, the school and the system, although some EER studies have also added measures of out-of-school learning (e.g. engagement in private tutoring, time spent on homework and other home learning environment measures) to provide additional controls of intake differences between schools or cohorts and to provide insights into the potential importance of such out-of-school learning opportunities.

The educative processes (broadly defined) within EER constitute the sub-field of School Improvement Research (SIR), which investigates factors such as classroom teaching, curriculum, school and classroom behaviour, learning climate, organisation and leadership, and their effect on student outcomes / outputs. These processes are closely linked to policy and system-level factors, just as inputs are intrinsically linked to the social and cultural milieu of the school, but in its forty-year-old morphology, EER has tended to overlook the impact of context on outcomes: the field measures what society deems valuable. This is not ‘context’ in the usual sense, but it is a context nevertheless - a philosophical one – and it is something that should not be ignored, especially as EER moves into a new phase where it is applied to the issue of equity.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Anthony Kelly: orcid.org/0000-0003-4664-8585

Catalogue record

Export record