Developments in the educational effectiveness research programme

Educational effectiveness as a research programme moved from an input-output paradigm to an input-process-output paradigm and, in view of the fact that so-called contextual school effectiveness is gaining in importance, this might be more properly termed a context-input-process-output-based approach. The aim of this introductory chapter is to put the state of the art of educational effectiveness research into perspective by summarizing the most important developments in output measurement, the identification of relevant input-, process- and contextual conditions and the causal modeling of these categories. Specific consideration is given to the improvement of substantive multi-level models of educational effectiveness and to available theories that could help to reveal the explanatory mechanisms behind these models.