Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness

First Annual Conference 2008 - Theme

Conference Theme: Critical Outcomes and Pragmatic Decisions

Education is regularly characterized as a highly complex system of causes, effects, and interactions. Decisions about how best to educate children, however, typically revolve around a limited number of questions:

• What should be taught?
• How should such content be taught and what are the attributes of high quality teachers?
• How should classrooms, schools, school districts, and school systems be organized and run to facilitate effective education?

These three questions highlight the importance of curriculum, teaching and teaching quality, and school organization and education policy. Recognizing the need to improve education in ways that will produce demonstrable results, the conference for 2008 invites reports of research that address such questions within one (or more) of the following educational outcomes:

• Reading, writing, and related language skills
• Mathematics and science achievement
• Social and behavioral competencies
• Dropout prevention and school completion

These four outcomes constitute the primary sections within which papers will be considered. A fifth section, research methodology, will address how a careful consideration of measurement, research design, and data analysis can improve our ability to draw clear conclusions about the effects of educational interventions.

Investigations that provide empirically based connections between critical outcomes and pragmatic decisions in education will offer the best fit for the 2008 conference.  All studies should therefore have results from completed studies in time for the meeting.  The methodology section may, however, accept studies based on either empirical studies or on theoretical explorations related to the study of cause-and-effect relations important for educational effectiveness.

Questions may be sent to inquiries@educationaleffectiveness.org

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