Educational effectiveness research and international comparative studies: Looking back and looking forward.

Abstract

With a little more than half of a century of conducting International Comparative Studies (ICS) and almost half of a century after the issuing of Coleman et al.’s study – often thought to have sparked Educational Effectiveness Research (EER) – we step back in this paper, and adopt a Janus-faced approach in considering the interrelatedness of ICS and EER. Looking back, we investigate how ICS and EER have contributed to each other; looking forward, we outline ways in which we think a stronger link between ICS and EER can contribute to the mutual development of both while, at the same time, serve their common goal: to better understand how education contributes to student learning and, in doing so, help improve student learning outcomes.