Contents:
1. Introduction
2. S. Tjepkema, H. ter Horst and M. Mulder Learning Organizations and HRD
2.1 Lifelong Learning, Organizational Learning and Learning-Oriented Organizations
2.2 Human Resource Development in Learning-Oriented Organizations
2.3 A European Outlook on HRD? Comparison with US and Japan
3. S. Tjepkema Methodology
3.1Case Study Design and Realization
3.2 Survey Design and Realization
4. D. Buyens and S. van Schelstraete Cases from Belgium
4.1 DVV - Insurance Company
4.2 Siemens Atea - Telecommunications Company
4.3 Alcatel Bell - Telecommunications Company
4.4 ISS - Cleaning Service Provider
4.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
4.6 Summary and Conclusions
5. T. Vaherva and H. Woods Cases from Finland
5.1 Vaisala - Electronic Measurements Systems Manufacturing
5.2 Valmet - Paper Machinery Manufacturing
5.3 Okobank Group (Central Unit) - Financial Services
5.4 Outokumpu Zinc - Steel Production
5.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
5.6 Summary and Conclusions
6. D. Belet Cases from France
6.1 Motorola - Semiconductors Plant
6.2 Auchan - Retail Organization
6.3 Accor Group - Hotel and Travel Service Provider
6.4 GT Group - Road Transport Firm
6.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
6.6 Summary and Conclusions
7. K. Meinicke, R. Reinhardt, A. Buschmann and P. Pawlowsky Cases from Germany
7.1 Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte - Domestic Appliance Manufacturer
7.2 AgrEvo - Chemicals Manufacturer
7.3 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) - Engineering Consultancy Firm
7.4 Sony Germany - Marketing, Sales and Service Organization
7.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
7.6 Summary and Conclusions
8. M.Tomassini and A. Cavrini Cases from Italy
8.1 Barilla - Food Producer
8.2 Bayer - Chemicals Manufacturer
8.3 Lever - Cosmetics Manufacturer
8.4 Datalogic - Bar code Manufacturer
8.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
8.6 Summary and Conclusions
9. H. ter Horst and S. Tjepkema Cases from The Netherlands
9.1 Akzo Nobel Chemicals - Chemicals Manufacturer (Salt)
9.2 Ericsson - Telecommunications Company
9.3 BAC - IT Centre of Dutch Inland Revenue Service
9.4 KIBC - Construction Company
9.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
9.6 Summary and Conclusions
10. S. Sambrook and J. Stewart Cases from the United Kingdom
10.1 Royal Mail - Postal Services
10.2 Rolls Royce Aerospace Group - Aero Engine Manufacturing
10.3 Royal Scottish Assurance - Financial Services
10.4 Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries - Beer Production
10.5 Factors Influencing HRD's Role and how HRD Deals with Them
10.6 Summary and Conclusions
11. S. Tjepkema Conclusions from Case Studies and Survey
11.1 Organizational Context
11.2 HRD's Envisioned Role
11.3 HRD Strategies
11.4 Influencing Factors
11.5 Summary
12. S. Sambrook and J. Stewart Reflections and Discussion
12.1 Implications
12.2 A Critical Examination of the Concepts of HRD, Learning Orientated Organizations and Lifelong Learning
12.3 Implications for Comparative and Collaborative Research
12.4 Final Thoughts

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book looks at the foundations of school self-evaluation from a scientific as from a practical perspective. Planning concepts, restructuring of education systems, organizational theory on schools, evaluation methodology and models of school effectiveness and school improvement are discussed as contributing to the overall conceptualization of school self-evaluation. A broad range of approaches is presented and methodological requirements are discussed. School self-evaluation contains controversial issues that reflect tension between the need for objectivity in a context that is permeated by values and potential conflicts of interests. Similar tensions may be seen to exist with respect to the static and "reductionist" aspects of available data collection procedures in a complex and dynamic situation and the appeal for external accountability on the one hand and improvement oriented self-refection on the other. The mission of the book is to clarify these tensions and offer ways to deal with them in practical applications. The school effectiveness knowledge base is offered as a substantive educational frame of references that serves an important function in selecting relevant factors for data collection and the use of the evaluation results.

This book examines the global movement of putting more emphasis on students' social and emotional development in education. It provides some order in the unstructured multitude of desirable socio-emotional educational objectives and ambitions that have resulted from this movement and builds on a careful conceptual analysis. It starts out by examining the roots of the movement and discusses different emphases. Next it makes use of instructional and psychological constructs and theories to arrive at meaningful categorizations of major domains and types of social-emotional "skills". One of the key assumptions is that social and emotional attributes are malleable by means of educational interventions. The book reviews available research evidence for this assumption, taking into account psychological studies and meta-analyses. It then creates new evidence based on a new meta-analysis, which concentrated on the effects of educational interventions on skills associated with the conscientiousness factor of the Big5 taxonomy. In the final chapter, the book discusses the implications for educational policy and practice; a discussion in which attention is given to political and ethical questions about the desirability of treating social and emotional attributes as educational goals.

This book examines the global movement of putting more emphasis on students' social and emotional development in education. It provides some order in the unstructured multitude of desirable socio-emotional educational objectives and ambitions that have resulted from this movement and builds on a careful conceptual analysis. It starts out by examining the roots of the movement and discusses different emphases. Next it makes use of instructional and psychological constructs and theories to arrive at meaningful categorizations of major domains and types of social-emotional "skills". One of the key assumptions is that social and emotional attributes are malleable by means of educational interventions. The book reviews available research evidence for this assumption, taking into account psychological studies and meta-analyses. It then creates new evidence based on a new meta-analysis, which concentrated on the effects of educational interventions on skills associated with the conscientiousness factor of the Big5 taxonomy. In the final chapter, the book discusses the implications for educational policy and practice; a discussion in which attention is given to political and ethical questions about the desirability of treating social and emotional attributes as educational goals.

This book provides a review of the effectiveness of Opportunity to Learn (OTL) operationalized as the association between OTL and student achievement. In addition, it presents an elaborate conceptual map in which OTL is regarded as part of a larger concept of curriculum alignment. Major components of this framework are national goals and standards, school curricula, formative tests, textbooks, actual delivery of content as part of teaching, and summative tests and examinations.Alignment between educational goals, intended and implemented curricula, and educational outcomes is considered an important prerequisite for effective education. The expectation is that better alignment leads to better student performance. The concept of OTL is commonly used to compare content covered, as part of the implemented curriculum, with student achievement. As such it is to be seen as a facet of the broader concept of "alignment". As it comes to enhancing OTL in educational policy and practice, proactive curriculum development is compared to a more retroactive orientation. Legitimate forms of test and examination preparation belong to this retroactive orientation, and are seen as favorable conditions for optimizing OTL. This book reviews the research evidence on the effects of OTL on student achievement by means of detailed descriptions of key-empirical studies, a review of meta-analyses, a "vote count" syntheses of 51 empirical studies, conducted between 1995 and 2015, and a secondary analysis based on TIMSS 2011, and PISA 2012 data. It concludes that the effect size of OTL, at about .30, is modest, but comparable in size to other effectiveness-enhancing conditions in schooling. The final chapter of the book provides suggestions for educational policy and practice to further optimize OTL.

This book is a critical assessment of the knowledge base on educational effectiveness, covering a period of five decades of research. It formulates a "lean" theory of good schooling, and identifies and explains instances of "ineffectiveness", such as low effect sizes of malleable conditions, for which expectations are highly strung. The book presents a systemic outlook on educational effectiveness and improvement, as it starts out from an integrated multi-level model that comprises system level, school level and instructional conditions. It offers a classification of school improvement strategies and scenarios for system level educational improvement. Above all, the analysis is very systematic, comprehensive and strongly grounded in theory. The book includes a case study analysis of various strands of improvement-oriented educational policy in the Netherlands as an illustration of some of the arguments used.

This book provides a thorough review of the research literature on the effect of school size in primary and secondary education on three types of outcomes: student achievement, non-cognitive outcomes and costs per student. Based on 84 scientific publications and several prior reviews, the book discusses four main areas: the impact of school size on cognitive learning outcomes and non-cognitive outcomes; the "state of the art" of empirical research on economies of size; the direct and indirect impact of school size, conditioned by other school context variables on student performance and the specific position of the Netherlands in an international perspective. The book presents summaries of the results and main conclusions found and discusses these with respect to their relevance for educational policy in general and for the Netherlands in particular. The book concludes with suggestions for future research on school size.

This book analyzes the productivity and effectiveness of a variety of time investments in education. It explores the methods used in education to optimize the time that students are exposed to learning content. Such methods include expanding official school time, optimizing "time on task," providing homework assignments, and creating learning opportunities beyond lesson hours. The book presents a review of earlier reviews and meta-analyses, secondary analyses of international data sets, and new meta-analyses concerning the effects of instruction time, homework and extended learning, beyond official school time. It explores the concept of time as a condition to enhance student achievement and discusses methodological issues in separating "genuine" time effects from related facets of educational quality. The book shows that the dependence of time effects on the quality of content choice and delivery raises critical questions for both researchers and policy planners. It further shows that sophisticated research designs are required to properly assess time effects, and that policy makers should be concerned about the bluntness of time as an instrument to enhance educational productivity.

This highly detailed study maps four decades of evolution of the concept of what constitutes effective school leadership. It analyses the theoretical background to these developments and advocates the utility of thinking of a 'lean' form of school leadership that is comparable to the concept of 'meta-control'. A wide-ranging survey of the empirical research literature on leadership effects includes the presentation of results from earlier meta-analyses as well as a new meta-analysis on some 25 studies carried out between 2005 and 2010. This survey demonstrates that older reviews and meta-analyses were predominantly based on so-called 'direct effect' studies, while more recent studies have tried to quantify the indirect effects of leadership, mediated by other school variables. While acknowledging the relatively small total effect of leadership on student outcomes, the study does identify promising intermediary factors which, stimulated by specific leadership behaviours, impact on student performance. The book ends by drawing out wider implications for educational practice and policy, presented under headings such as 'schools need leadership', 'the toolkit of the school leader as a meta-controller', 'the special case of turning around failing schools' and 'efficiency of school leadership'. In passing, the authors make several suggestions about potentially fruitful next steps in researching the effects of school leadership.

Active citizenship is an objective of schooling in an increasingly complex context, in which social cohesion of the multicultural society is a cause for growing societal concern. International co-operation between European countries and a growing heterogeneity of the (school) populations of most European countries have led to an increased interest in education for citizenship. The core question dealt with pertains to the role that schools can play in developing citizenship through formal and informal learning.

Day-to-day school life is seen as a rich environment in which aspects of functioning in a democratic society and dynamic interplay with rules, leadership and peers with different backgrounds are experienced and form a source of learning. In this view the school context functions as a micro-cosmos to exercise "school citizenship" as a bridge to societal citizenship and state citizenship. The book brings together material from Cyprus, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Romania and The Netherlands.

This book is a critical assessment of the knowledge base on educational effectiveness, covering a period of five decades of research. It formulates a "lean" theory of good schooling, and identifies and explains instances of "ineffectiveness", such as low effect sizes of malleable conditions, for which expectations are highly strung. The book presents a systemic outlook on educational effectiveness and improvement, as it starts out from an integrated multi-level model that comprises system level, school level and instructional conditions. It offers a classification of school improvement strategies and scenarios for system level educational improvement. Above all, the analysis is very systematic, comprehensive and strongly grounded in theory. The book includes a case study analysis of various strands of improvement-oriented educational policy in the Netherlands as an illustration of some of the arguments used.

How much do schools really matter? How sure are we on "what works" in education and why? Why is it that certain educational practices work better than others in improving educational effectiveness?

In this book recent research and theoretical interpretations are used in a critical analysis of the knowledge base on educational effectiveness. It offers new insights into the most promising levers for school improvement and shows future directions for educational research.

In the first part of the book concepts of school and educational analysis are defined, and various alternative perspectives discussed. The scope and range of application of the concept of school effectivenesss is demonstrated by referring to empirical studies on the stability of school effects over time, the consistency of effects over grades, classrooms and subject matter areas and the generalizability of research findings across contexts. Particular attention is given to international comparative findings.

The second part of the book is an assessment of the available knowledge base by means of a context analysis of instruments to measure hypothetical effectiveness enhancing conditions and a review of reviews and meta-analyses.

In the third part the modelling and theoretical interpretation of educational effectiveness is the central issue, laying bare basic explanatory mechanisms that are examined for their usefulness as levers for school improvement.

In the final chapter implications for future research in educational effectiveness are examined.

Active citizenship is an objective of schooling in an increasingly complex context, in which social cohesion of the multicultural society is a cause for growing societal concern. International co-operation between European countries and a growing heterogeneity of the (school) populations of most European countries have led to an increased interest in education for citizenship. The core question dealt with pertains to the role that schools can play in developing citizenship through formal and informal learning.

Day-to-day school life is seen as a rich environment in which aspects of functioning in a democratic society and dynamic interplay with rules, leadership and peers with different backgrounds are experienced and form a source of learning. In this view the school context functions as a micro-cosmos to exercise "school citizenship" as a bridge to societal citizenship and state citizenship. The book brings together material from Cyprus, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Romania and The Netherlands.

The quality of education is a term that is frequently used in public debates. Understood in the sense of education being generally okay, or rather, most frequently, as not okay . Perhaps there is an overruling nostalgic view that formerly education was better than today. In scholarly discourse there are those who maintain that the quality of education is an illusive term, with varying interpretations in different settings and by different stakeholders.

In this book the complexity of the concept of education quality is recognized, but a conceptual framework is presented that makes quality, despite its complexity, amenable to rational and empirical analysis. Productivity, equity, effectiveness, efficiency and responsiveness of education systems are seen as key facets of quality. A concrete set of indicators is presented that makes for the measurement of these quality facets. In the second part of the book the quality framework is applied to an analysis of the quality of education in the Netherlands. Common sense in the Netherlands is dominated by the view that the quality of education is a course for serious concern. Some recent quality reviews take the same pessimistic outlook. However, the current overview of indicators on the Dutch system, seen from an international perspective, presents a picture that is much more positive. Still there is always room for improvement, in the case of the Netherlands this should probably be sought in diminishing the selectivity of the system as a way to improve participation in higher education.