Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence

have no books or facilities will be much greater than similar inputs to well-funded
institutions.

Another example of the difficulties that arise in taking a macro view of school
effectiveness studies can be illustrated by the well publicised literature on the effect of
textbooks on school achievement. Fuller's review indicates that 16 out of 24 studies
show positive effects of the availability of texts and reading materials on achievement.
Though the dependent variable was textbooks/student the independent variables that
were controlled for in the studies varied. But perhaps more important is the lack of
insight into whether the studies related to the first pieces of reading material available
or additions to an existing stock (though one study (Heyneman, Jamison and
Montenegro 1983) does show no gains resulting from a change in the pupil/book ratio
from 2:1 to 1:1). Neither is the qualitative relationship explored between the types of
reading material and the demands of the tests used to measure achievement - it is
tempting to ask do comics have the same effect as academic reading materials? The
improvement in achievement attributable to book provision in the Philippines in one of
these studies (Heyneman, Jamison and Montenegro 1983) is argued to be twice the
impact that would be gained by lowering class size from 40 to 10 students. But this
finding uses evidence from an experimental study in the Philippines and data on class
size effects from the U.S.A. which presumes that the range of variation in class size
considered and teaching methods are indistinguishable between the two systems.
Forewarned of some of the analytical pitfalls it is worth turning to some more of the
findings. Fuller and Heyneman (1989) have attempted to identify effective and
ineffective factors that influence school achievement, reducing their earlier list of 27
factors to a more manageable 9. These turn out to be:

Some comment on each is in order. Repetition appears not to improve achievement in

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