Concept and Design Developments in School Improvement Research: Longitudinal, Multilevel and Mixed Methods and Their Relevance for Educational Accountability

Tobias Feldhoff is full professor for education science. He is head of theCenter for School Improvement and School Effectiveness Research and chair of the Center for Research on School, Education and Higher Education (ZSBH)at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He is also co-coordinator of the Special Interest Group Educational Effectiveness and Improvementof the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI). His research topics are school improvement, school effectiveness, educational governance and the link between them. One focus of his work is to develop designs and find methods to better understand school improvement processes, their dynamics and effects. He is also interested in an organisation-theoretical foundation of school improvement.

Katharina Maag Merki is a full professor of educational science at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Maag Merki’s main research interests include research on school improvement, educational effectiveness, and self-regulated learning. She has over 20 years of experience in conducting complex interdisciplinary longitudinal analyses. Her research has been distinguished by several national and international grants. Her paper on ‘Conducting intervention studies on school improvement’, published in the Journal of Educational Administration, was selected by the journal’s editorial team as a Highly Commended Paper of 2014. At the moment, she is conducting a four year multi-method longitudinal study to investigate mechanisms and effects of school improvement capacity on student learning in 60 primary schools in Switzerland. She is member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Prof.Dr. Falk Radisch is an expert in research methods for educational research, especially school effectiveness, school improvement and all day schooling. He has huge experience in planning, implementing and analyzing large scale and longitudinal studies. For his research he has been using data sets from large scale assessments like PISA, PIRLS, and TIMSS, as well as implementing large scale and longitudinal studies in different areas of school-based research. He has been working on methodological problems of school-based research, especially for longitudinal, hierarchical and nonlinear methods for school effectiveness and school improvement research.