Education and development the issues and the evidence - Education Research Paper
No. 06, 1993, 61 p.
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2.2 School achievement, the IEA
data and effective schools studies
2.2.1 School achievement studies
2.2.2 Recent methodological developments
2.2.3 Some results from the IEA science studies
2.2.4 A note on the effective schools literature
2.2.1 School achievement studies
There are now a substantial number of studies on the factors that effect school
achievement. The earliest examples were conducted in developed countries and
established the importance of socio-economic background as a determinant of the
performance of students in different types of school (Plowden 1967, Coleman et al
1966, Jencks 1972) and began to analyse the reasons for this. These studies were
accompanied by a developing literature which offered a critique of the methods used
and which also became entangled in the debates about nature and nurture in the
development of intelligence, school achievement and subsequent success in the labour
market (Bowles and Gintis 1976, Little 1975). Much of the concern was to explore to
what extent meritocracies functioned as such and to what extent educational
achievement behaved as an intervening variable explaining why in these societies socio-
economic status of children continued to be linked closely to parents socio-economic
status (Halsey 1977). These studies tended to show that school factors were less
important determinants of scholastic success than home background factors. It was,
however, misleading to draw the conclusion, as some popularisers did, that this implied
that not much of importance went on in schools. It was differences that were being
studied not absolute effects - as a weary commentator observed "students don't imagine
algebra". Neither do most of them independently establish Newton's laws of motion.
Subsequently studies have appeared which extend the analysis and demonstrate that
within school factors may be more important than previously supposed (e.g. Rutter et al
1983, Mortimore et al 1988). The studies also began to be applied to data from
developing countries and suggested that school effects might be even more important
than in developed countries. Thus Heyneman and Loxley's (1983) study of science