Understanding Others, Educating Ourselves Getting More from International Comparative Studies in Education (2003) / Chapter Skim
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3 Impact
3 Impact
Pages 29-50
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From page 29... ...
Major investments in international comparative studies in education, however, are proceeding without analysis of these assumptions with respect to individual studies or programs of study. As in other areas of education research, gauging the actual impact of these studies in terms of findings used, changes in student achievement, policies debated, understanding expanded is difficult.
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International education research in the United States, like domestic research, suffers from a lack of infrastructure that could make research matter. Where do the results of research flow into the education system?
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From page 31... ...
Since decentralized education decision making is highly prized in the United States, the task of getting policy-relevant findings to the decentralized level will continue to challenge both domestic and international education researchers for the foreseeable future. Because of this fragmented decision making, international and domestic education studies are more likely to have an impact at the school or classroom level if design and analysis teams include representatives from the state and local levels and if the results can be disaggregated by state and locality.
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Early childhood educators interested in improving their instruction methods were in a position to try various models at will, knowing that their students would not face either mandatory exit exams from kindergarten or entry exams for elementary school. University-based scholars in the United States had studied the Reggio Emilia model in Italy and other countries and offered their expertise to some Reggio Emilia experiments in the United States.
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From page 34... ...
While the Reggio Emilia model has been influential among specialists in early childhood education, the extensive research on school choice and privatization in several other industrialized countries, widely reported in the academic and popular presses and synthesized in studies commissioned by the U.S. government, has not played a major role in the debate on choice and privatization in the United States (see Box 2-2~.
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For these reasons, international research is likely to be more expensive than comparable domestic research. Finally, international educational research findings lend themselves more readily than domestic findings to rhetoric that plays to Americans' deep-rooted concerns about the relative competitiveness of the U.S.
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From page 37... ...
These connections suggest that the impact of international studies is sometimes recursive. For example, TIMSS 1995 played a role in
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From page 38... ...
mathematics community to absorb Liping Ma's insights about the superior knowledge base of elementary mathematics teachers in China and to seize the Singapore mathematics curriculum. The TIMSS videotapes, which were widely used in professional development, and The Teaching Gap (Stigler and Hiebert, 1999)
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From page 39... ...
Several cases highlight the important role played by artifacts actual textbooks from Singapore, children's artwork in the Reggio Emilia traveling exhibit in documenting techniques, as opposed to abstract concepts. Understanding the power of such artifacts, the Council for Basic Education's Schools Around the World2 program recently began giving a small group of teachers in nine countries the opportunity to compare examples of student work on similar subjects and problems.
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argues that lesson study caught on among practitioners because it is a commonsense idea, appealing to teachers' sense of professionalism, teacher-controlled, able to fill gaps in teachers' skills, and a concrete rather than a theoretical activity. Chokshi also reports, however, that several researchers working with teachers to operationalize and adapt lesson study anticipate that several factors will make it difficult to adapt to the U.S.
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From page 42... ...
At times, scholarly international comparative studies or professional development materials may be the second or third step in the process of introducing an international innovation to the United States, and the early-adapting teachers in the United States may provide some of the primary data for those studies. For example, as with any innovation, teachers or school boards who may have a limited understanding of the context of an international model will make sense of the model in their own terms, adapting it in ways that strengthen or weaken the effects intended by the model's developers.
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Participants in a Board on Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) symposium reflecting on the results of TIMSS (National Research Council, 1999)
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Work on benchmarking standards with international data continues on a state-by-state basis through the nonprofit organizations Achieve and McREL.4 After TIMSS, school districts working with the Council of Great City Schools were more willing to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Sharon Lewis, personal communication, April 2002) , and discussions of a voluntary national test took on new life (Lois Peak, personal communication, April 2002~.
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Did different jurisdictions with different performances effectively cancel out each other's effects? Even had the United States made significant gains, one journalist suggested, officials might be reluctant to showcase international education studies in which U.S.
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These five stages echo some of the innovations described in this report, including the Reggio Emilia traveling exhibit containing artifacts of young children's classroom work and the lesson-study scholars linking Japanese teachers with U.S. teachers.
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The Research Community Historically, the U.S. education research community owes much to comparative education studies.
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Some high-profile, practitioner-driven efforts in the United States to try out internationally derived innovations, such as the Singapore mathematics curriculum and the Reggio Emilia early childhood program, may have the effect of getting some practitioner issues on the education research agenda.
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. IMPLICATIONS This brief, illustrative review contains many ideas for increasing the use and usability of international comparative education studies.
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funders should support reviews of the impact of ongoing and completed international comparative studies on the practice of education on a planned and continuing basis to determine how effects can be enhanced. In summary, those looking for ways to balance investments in different types of international comparative education research should consider more factors than cost and topics.
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