Educational Effectiveness Theory

Katharina Maag Merki is Professor of Educational Science at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her main interests include research on educational governance, school effectiveness and school development, and self-regulated learning. She is cofounder and co-coordinator of the Special Interest Group "Educational Evaluation, Accountability and School Improvement" of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction.Marcus Emmerich is Professor for Educational Sciences with a focus on inclusion, diversity and heterogeneity at the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, Germany. His theoretical and empirical research focuses on education inequality, school development, and educational governance.Monika Holmeier is a Postdoctoral Researcher for Research Methods in the Centre for Science and Technology Education, School for Teacher Education, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Switzerland. Her research is focused on science education, assessment, equity, and inquiry-based learning. She is the author of the book Grading in State-wide Exit Exams (2013) and has published articles in academic books and journals.

• Preface: System effectiveness and improvement: the importance of theory and context Introduction: Further development of educational effectiveness theory in a multilevel context: from theory to methodology and from empirical evidence back to theory 1. Theories on educational effectiveness and ineffectiveness 2. Does accountability pressure through school inspections promote school improvement? 3. Comparability of semester and exit exam grades: long-term effect of the implementation of state-wide exit exams 4. Phantom effects in school composition research: consequences of failure to control biases due to measurement error in traditional multilevel models 5. Developing, testing, and using theoretical models for promoting quality in education