Doing Comparative Education Research

Approaches and methods in comparative education are of obvious importance, but do not always receive adequate attention. This second edition of a well-received book, containing thoroughly updated and additional material, contributes new insights within the longstanding traditions of the field. A particular feature is the focus on different units of analysis. Individual chapters compare places, systems, times, cultures, values, policies, curricula and other units. These chapters are contextualised within broader analytical frameworks which identify the purposes and strengths of the field. The book includes a focus on intra-national as well as cross-national comparisons, and highlights the value of approaching themes from different angles. As already demonstrated by the first edition of the book, the work will be of great value not only to producers of comparative education research but also to users who wish to understand more thoroughly the parameters and value of the field.

In the newly emerging global economic order governments and policy makers are keen to seek ideas from other countries and recognise the importance of looking comparatively. This expansion of interest in comparative education brings new challenges for the discipline: research may be undertaken by non-specialists (by consultants and politicians or educationists from quite different backgrounds); the short lifespan of democratically elected governments may lend attraction to ‘quick-fix’ solutions; statistics and data may be decontextualised. Added to these challenges there is the worldwide proliferation of education providers outside state control and the transformation of teaching and learning brought about by the new information technology. This book rethinks the role of comparative education in the light of these changing circumstances and looks at the new opportunities they bring.

Approaches and methods in comparative education research are of obvious importance, but do not always receive adequate attention. This book contributes new insights within the longstanding traditions of the field. A particular feature is the focus on different units of analysis. Individual chapters compare places, systems, times, cultures, values, policies, curricula and other units.

Sections include: Comparative orientations; Schools in context; Achievement, assessment and evaluating learning; Communist education; Educational policy.

Since 1988, the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) at the (U.S.) National Research Council of the National Academies has engaged in activities designed to increase the rigor and sophistication of international comparative studies in education by encouraging synergies between large and smaller scale international comparative education research, to identify gaps in the existing research base, and to assist in communicating results to policy makers and the public. Under the current grant (1998-2002), funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, BICSE has sponsored public events and commissioned papers on the effects of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the power of video technology in international education research, international perspectives on teacher quality, and advances in the methodology of cross-national surveys of education achievement. This report responds to a request from the board's sponsors under the current grant to produce a report that builds on its previous work.

This book explores the evolution and current state of the scholarly field of comparative and international education over 200 years of development. Experts in the field explore comparative and international education in each of the major world regions.

Issues of methodology have been at the centre of debate among Comparative Educationists for decades. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from Europe, Latin America, and the USA, reflect current interests in the changing metascientific discourse in the field of Comparative Education. A shift in the nature of this discourse from prescription to socio-historical description is particularly clear in the essays in Part I, in which frameworks are developed within which analyses of the field's differing traditions, currents, and paradigms can be made. Theories which direct attention to historical explanations and policy-oriented predictions and which inform conceptual problems in making cross-cultural comparisons are examined in Part II. In these essays reference is made to both the different epistemological premises and the application of such theories to substantive comparative research. The essays in Part III add an unusual dimension to methodological debates in so far as they define the disciplinary status and theoretical functions of Comparative Education within the wider context of Education (or Educology) as the basic discipline.

Explores how educational research from a comparative perspective has been instrumental in broadening and testing hypotheses from institutional theory. This book contains theoretical discussions of the impact that comparative research has had on institutional theory and comparative scholarship that tests basic institutional assumptions and trends.