Establishing Links between Research on Educational Effectiveness and School Improvement: Constraints and Perspectives

Dear Colleagues, 

Educational effectiveness research (EER) addresses the question of what works in education and why, for whom, and under which conditions. At the same time, research on school improvement aims to support schools in their attempts to promote quality in education. However, the two fields although closely related, have different priorities and have utilised different approaches. For example, from a methodological perspective, EER has mainly used quantitative approaches, whereas research on school improvement has mainly used qualitative approaches, something that has created difficulties in the attempts towards a fruitful merging of the fields.

This Special Issue is in line with the attempts of the research community to establish links between educational effectiveness research (EER) and research on school improvement. Many researchers have identified that an important constraint of the existing approaches of modelling educational effectiveness is the fact that the whole process does not contribute significantly to the improvement of teaching practice. Taking this into consideration, this Special Issue aims to contribute to the discussions and to highlight current practices related with the use of EER results for improvement purposes. The results of the studies to be included in the Special Issue could therefore provide valuable insights related with the extent to which EER can be used for improving teaching practice and student attainment. It is important to note that the focus of the Special Issue is not only on improving quality of education but also equity, in the sense of providing the best possible opportunities for all students to progress irrespective of their personal and background characteristics.

The Special Issue will address different approaches for school improvement that have utilised in various ways and the knowledge base of EER and of school improvement research, and their strengths and limitations will also be discussed. The extent to which research on EER and research on school improvement could be merged will also be further elaborated.

Finally, the Special Issue aims to include studies that relate not only to school and teacher improvement but also to improving other contextual and operational school characteristics such as school leadership, school culture and ethos, teacher collaboration, teacher job satisfaction, etc. This is important, since to better understand how improvement takes place in a school, it is important to analyse how the members of the school team collaborate, exchange new ideas, and design their action plans for improvement.

Dr. Panayiotis Antoniou
Prof. Dr. Leonidas Kyriakides
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.