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While some academic health centers have organizational structures to support educational scholarship, such as Medical Education Research Units (MERU), many education scholars may lack access to such institutional resources to support their research agenda and professional growth. In 2014, as part of an externally funded education grant, three faculty educators established a unique education data management system Research & Evaluation Data for Educational Improvement (REDEI). Lacking an institutional MERU, they established an educational research community of practice (CoP) using REDEI as the research dataset. The senior faculty member's effort to facilitate the group is funded by the Dean's Office. The CoP meets every 2 weeks to generate research ideas, discuss analytic approach and strategy, review analyses designed to address or explore a research question, and plans for manuscript development. Our CoP has grown from 3 to 18 members representing faculty educators, administrators, and staff across many departments in the School of Medicine. As of 2021, the REDEI system contains performance data on 1,246 students across all years of undergraduate medical education. To date, we have published 11 peer-reviewed educational research manuscripts. Five learners have served as coauthors (three medical students and two residents), three of whom were first authors. Eleven additional papers are in process. This community of practice supports productivity, provides mentorship, overcomes barriers, and is flexible enough for people to join when they can or when an area of interest is actively under development. We are working on educational interdisciplinary research grant submission and creating collaborations with other institutions. Our focus remains on honing skills in grantsmanship, identification of impactful research questions, application of rigorous methods and instrumentation to address them, and refining process of budget development, timelines, and other planning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Current policy discourses emphasise the importance of evidence in education, including evidencing the impact of teacher professional learning on student outcomes. Randomised controlled trial (RCT) designs are promoted to measure ‘impact’. Recent debates about this reflect longer standing methodological disputes. Advocates of comparative approaches contend that these are uniquely capable of establishing causality. However, others dispute this and consider their application in education as often being flawed. Whilst acknowledging the importance of these debates, our concern is how RCTs and similar evaluation designs are specifically used to evaluate innovations in which professional learning is important. Purpose: Arguably, professional learning is often under-theorised within experimental and quasi-experimental designs. The purpose of this paper is to address this by encouraging developers of innovations and evaluators to consider a proposed typology of professional learning and other important relevant methodological issues. This is so that developers of innovations that involve professional learning are better able to theorise their endeavours and to support more appropriate design of RCTs and other forms of evaluation of innovations. Sources of evidence: Theoretical and methodological literature from diverse fields is drawn on, namely: descriptions of RCT implementation and process evaluation designs; research on effective professional development; and theoretical models of professional learning. Insights and theories from this literature are used to develop and illustrate the typology and to identify methodological concerns and potential ways to address these. Main argument: In trials of those innovations that involve professional learning, there is both assessment of the extent to which professional learning occurs and also of whether resulting changes in practice improve outcomes. A novel typology of three different ways that professional learning may occur in innovations is proposed. This is related to the centrality (or not) of professional learning to the innovation’s success and related to the form and purpose of the professional learning involved. The three analytical categories described are pedagogical professional learning, technical professional learning and curriculum professional learning. Based on this typology, features of professional learning that are likely to lead to impact on student outcomes are discussed. Tensions are identified between the implementation of experimental and quasi-experimental designs and interpretation of resulting evidence. Further, tensions are identified between the complex and recursive nature of pedagogical professional learning systems and the models of linear pathways in some RCT designs. This is illustrated by discussing examples of innovations and trials. Conclusion: The proposed typology and greater theorisation of professional learning can support more robust evaluation design. It is important to assess rigorously teacher learning alongside changes in student outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gap between educational outcomes and labour market demand is one of the most important issues concerning researchers and specialists in the field of educational planning and policy-making. Innovation, entrepreneurship, diversity and creativity characterize the globalized, high-tech labour markets. Whilst striving for a sustainable future, Oman is still grappling with entrenched, traditional methods of education. These educational methods are incapable of meeting diverse learning needs or producing young people, equipped to readily take their places in the workforce. Structured interviews with key figures in Oman were conducted to gauge the prospect of a vision of education which encompasses alternative schools, programmes and pathways to enhance opportunities for all students and facilitate outcomes that better match demands created by an increasingly sophisticated working environment. This paper is produced at a time when planning is underway for Vision 2040 and provides insight into the challenges and opportunities for alternative education in Oman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to explore the design and implementation of early years educational policy in England in the period 1997-2004. First to be described are the innovations in policy (i.e. the promise), followed by the 'evidence base' for new policy (i.e. the research), the delivery of new services (i.e. the achievement), and finally the tensions and gaps which remain (i.e. the shortfall). The paper will focus on evidence concerning expansion of services and on the benefit of early years education on children's development. It is argued that early years education in England has been transformed through the following: integration of education and care at local and national level, the introduction of the Foundation Stage Curriculum 3-6 years and its birth-3 years supplement, and the firm focus on families as well as children in the delivery of services. There are, however, gaps and tensions to be resolved before the overall vision can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the indigenous sources available in Ethiopia as a resource for philosophy and philosophy of education. In the process it makes a small contribution to the ongoing debate among philosophers as to whether there is a distinctive African philosophy. The paper illustrates, first, what is sometimes referred to as the ‘deep knowledge’ underlying more day-to-day beliefs in Ethiopia (or more specifically in this case those of the Amhara-Tigre cultural complex) and their application in ‘educational magic’ and, secondly, the 17th century philosophical writing of Zara Ya'eqob and Walda Heywat, which is remarkable for its Enlightenment-style attachment to reason and argumentation. Two more directly educational indigenous sources are then explored: the educational thought and practice of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and non-formal education in villages. Finally, the paper considers the relevance of these sources to contemporary educational development and suggests that they merit continuing attention and reference both from the point of view of preserving cultural identity and continuity and also, more pragmatically, because there are ideas, values and practices in the tradition which have continuing relevance for Ethiopians grappling with educational development issues today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to draw attention to the extent to which liberatory pedagogical intentions can function as part of a technology of surveillance unless, as socially critical educators, we actively work against our own tendency to totalising educational discourse It notes a number of folkloric traditions in pre-service teacher education that derive from discursive practices which position students ether as inevitably acting out a well-documented scenario or as 'victims' of the dominant technocratic model of teacher education This paper suggests a way forward for teacher educators through the application of post-positivist theorising to what has come to be understood as 'proven' by past and current educational research. This process is exemplified in the discussion by the application of post-structuralist deconstructive techniques to avant garde educational text in order to bring forward for scrutiny the binary oppositions in our own 'transformative' educational discourse. The implications of 'advocacy' research are discussed and a plea made for pedagogy that intervenes in socially critical practices by making problematic our own 'versions' of student teacher needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a letter from the editor of "Comparative Education" concerning the February 2009 issue. The issue discusses the potential and impact of international collaboration in the areas of research, performance assessment, policy formulation, and international development cooperation. Papers in the issue include a paper concerning how international quality assurance and evaluation mechanisms are influencing policy formulation worldwide and a paper about the impact of educational innovations in Japan.

This paper reviews educational effectiveness theory, concentrating on the time stability of the teacher and school effect. The contribution of longitudinal studies investigating the long-term effect of schools and teachers to modelling educational effectiveness is discussed. Findings of a longitudinal study on the progress of students (N=1681) in mathematics during their first four years at the primary school are presented. Results of this study reveal that traditional approaches of measuring educational effectiveness tend to overestimate the short-term effects of teachers and student background factors and underestimate the long-term effects of teachers and schools. Implications of findings for the theory of educational effectiveness and especially for the concepts of teacher and school effects and their stability are drawn. Finally, suggestions for establishing evaluation mechanisms to improve practice are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary North American insecurities and fears are the focus of this article. In the first section, the inter-related concepts of insecurity, fear and vulnerability are theorised, and the argument put forward that these have come to constitute a dominant discourse in contemporary North American society. In the second section of the paper, the components of this discourse are presented by reviewing what North Americans fear, including terrorism, crime and violence, and the 'Other'. Comparisons and local manifestations of this discourse in Canada, Mexico and the US are described. The final section turns to the educational implications (effects) of this discourse as it has been taken up across the three nations. While other comparativists have focused on phenomena such as globalisation and neo-liberalism to explain contemporary education reform, the author argues that it is the discourse of fear and insecurity that now underpins educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of teachers' agency as multifarious change, embedded in educational reform in the global era, stands largely unexamined in educational policy. Although the concept of teachers as agents has political implications, beyond this, examining teachers' agency offers ways of describing and reviewing changes to teachers' work and relations within evolving education systems. Local systems draw from globally orientated education policies, which continue to influence to the way that local systems redesign education. In the global context, education systems are complex interactions between structure and agency, evidenced as 'multiplicity undergoing change'. In other words, there is dynamic and dialectic interplay between structure and agency. Teachers' agency, germane to dynamic interplay, means that teachers are not only engaging in the reproduction of structural change aligning globalization-driven reforms to their work and practice, but also, in adapting and reacting to new structural conditions, they are transformed through their actions. In this paper, the focus becomes teachers' agency as a framework for understanding how teachers are redesigned and reassembled to do things differently within restructured education systems. Finally, the discussion considers the possible consequences of teachers work and practice, given teachers' agency relative to the macro policy of superfigures and the transitional national/global structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technologies do not follow some pre-determined and inevitable course from their context of production to their context of use, and technologies used in schools are no exception. Rather, technologies and their use in the classroom are socially contextualised. They are often appropriated in ways unanticipated by their developers, locking into institutional arrangements and reflecting elements of the prevailing social relations in and around the particular context(s) of application. Through the discussion of a particular technology (the Logo programming language) as a case study in educational innovation, this article demonstrates how the use of technologies in schools is 'socially shaped'. The paper looks into the place that Logo occupied within the institutional and organisational cultures of US and UK mainstream schools after its introduction in the early 1980s. It discusses the ways in which Logo was received in the educational arena and was implicated in the politics of educational innovation at a time of conservative restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive national educational change is a complex and often difficult process. In countries such as Viet Nam where the government exercises tight control over social and economic development strategies, wide scale changes to an education system are often not possible. Viet Nam's increasing engagement with private sector development has, however, enabled greater flexibility for improving and strengthening its education system. In response to Viet Nam's transition to a market economy, educational planners have had to consider strategies for making the education system more responsive to current and future labour demands. Accordingly, beginning in the early 1990s, the Government of Viet Nam put in place policies to enable the education system to 'modernise'. Guided by the principle that an investment in education is an investment in economic development, the government has pursued and continues to pursue an agenda of educational reform by means of curriculum reform. Early evidence indicates that despite an initial rapid development and implementation of change-driven policies and strategic directions, the pace of reform is slowing down. The thesis of this paper is that a programme of substantial education change and innovation in Viet Nam is actually a programme of cautious reform based on select targeting of particular school populations, in this case, populations in the larger cities, economic priority zones and urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the concerns, parameters and silences emerging in the field of English research on contemporary educational restructuring. The research effort oriented to the investigation of Thatcherism and the marketisation and its neglect of alternatives to Thatcherism is noted. This pattern of emphases and silences in research seems to have arisen as a result of changes in the research-policy context, and because of the way Thatcherism has been conceptualised in educational research. I argue that these devolopments have encouraged a narrowing of both research and political horizons in education. I suggest that a more comprehensive framework for analysing educational restructuring can be developed by recontextualising Thatcherism and drawing on recent social science research on institutional design. Such aframework would appear to offer a basis for tackling the empirical and normative work of assessing probable futures and the possibilities of preferred futures in the practical work of education reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]