Understanding Others, Educating Ourselves Getting More from International Comparative Studies in Education (2003) / Chapter Skim
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From page 12... ...
; aim both to generate new hypotheses and test existing ones; and cover topics relevant to many levels, ranging from early childhood education to employment-related training for adults, and from governance issues for public and private schools to more practical issues, such as parent involvement in schools. The breadth of these international comparative education studies and the way they spur interest in other research are illustrated by the summaries in the boxes scattered throughout this chapter.
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From page 13... ...
In contrast, the data from Liping Ma's single-researcher study included interviews with only about 72 Chinese teachers, but Ma eventually used those data to articulate a kind of knowledge base for elementary mathematics teachers. Her work is now spurring domestic research in the United States on what Ma refers to as "the profound understanding of fundamental mathematics." DIFFERENT PURPOSES In this report, we distinguish three types of international comparative education studies according to their initial, primary purpose.
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From page 14... ...
Furthermore, the types do not neatly divide the corpus of international comparative education research into three equal parts, either in terms of number of studies or funding. This typology would be inadequate for the study of international comparative education research as a discipline per se.
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From page 16... ...
Type I studies that collect primary data tend to be the most expensive, in terms of both direct costs, such as the diplomatic capital required to secure agreement at the national level for primary data collection and the cost of conducting surveys and employing experts to organize and direct them, and indirect costs, such as the time demands placed on student and
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From page 17... ...
The collection and dissemination of domestic education statistics was mandated almost 90 years before Congress authorized the U.S. Office of Education to fund broader education research (National Research Council, 1992~.3 Demand for Type I studies is often generated by policy makers.
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From page 18... ...
Type II studies tend to be smaller in scale and therefore less expensive than those Type I studies that collect primary data, although they may be more costly than Type III studies (described below)
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From page 21... ...
Such studies are not designed to have immediate policy relevance, though many are of relevance to policy makers. Rather these studies are designed to bring to light new concepts, to stimulate interest in educational issues, to generally deepen understanding of education as a practice and as a social phenomenon and, most generally, to establish the foundation on which all other comparative education research is based.
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From page 23... ...
Type III studies that involve in-depth analysis of a single aspect of an education system can be relatively inexpensive in terms of both direct and indirect costs; unlike more expensive Type I and II studies, they often do not produce either generalizable findings or research methodologies capable of being precisely replicated in other jurisdictions. Instead, many offer rich descriptions of context in particular settings; these rich descriptions can provide clues to the variables influencing the phenomenon.
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From page 24... ...
Federally funded studies to date do this, to a limited extent, by focusing on Type I studies of achievement, in core curriculum areas, in formal K-12 schools, in countries perceived to be economic competitors of the United States. To the extent that these issues remain priorities for domestic education research and these international studies indeed are structured and timed in such a way that they are able to inform domestic research and policy, this current de facto international agenda is on target.
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From page 25... ...
, these additional areas point to questions worth pursuing in future involvement in international studies. Recommendation 1: Funding for international comparative education research should reflect a balance among the three types of international comparative education studies and should encompass a broad array of methodologies, scale, purposes, and topics.
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From page 26... ...
One way to ensure that international comparative education studies support and inform the domestic education research agenda is to encourage major domestic education research efforts to include an international component when that would add value to the domestic research findings. As do multimethod studies, international components work best when they are not simply contemporaneous add-one to relatively complete domestic studies, but rather are executed in time to provide input at specific stages of the design, data collection, and analysis of domestic studies.
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From page 27... ...
Many scholarly debates about the validity, relevance, and generalizability of findings of international comparative education studies focus on the extent to which context has been recognized and properly taken into account in various aspects of the study. While randomized field trials and quasi-experimental designs are sometimes held up as the gold standard in domestic education research on effects of interventions, such methods can work only when in-depth knowledge of specific contexts allows researchers to model and control independent variables.
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From page 28... ...
funders should encourage multicomponent research studies with longer time horizons, using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. In summary, because policy makers and educators in the United States cannot know in advance which studies will be critical, a prudent approach to developing a research agenda for international comparative studies in education is to support and encourage a broad range of study types and topics, with increased attention to those methodologies, topics, and geographical regions that have received relatively less investment in recent years, incorporating more international components into domestic studies, with some formative evaluations to study how domestic and international components can complement each other.
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