Conference on "Closing the Gaps? Differential Accountability and Effectiveness as a Road to School Improvement"

Educational effectiveness, accountability, evaluation, and improvement are at the very heart of educational research and focus primarily on the interactions between students' learning outcomes, institutional settings, and classroom and school environments. But examining the effects of the school environment, the classroom instruction, and the quality of teaching on important educational outcomes such as student achievement and motivation needs a differential perspective, as these effects may vary considerably across schools, subjects, grade levels, cohorts, teachers, and sub-groups of students. This conference will take such a perspective by presenting the state-of-the-art of differential effectiveness, accountability, evaluation, and improvement to the scientific community, policy-makers, teachers, principals, and the public. The conference will be organized as a collaboration between the research group "Large-Scale Educational Assessments (LEA)", the Centre for Educational Measurement at the University of Oslo (CEMO), and the EARLI Special Interest Groups 18 "Educational Effectiveness" and 23 "Educational Evaluation, Accountability and School Improvement" in Oslo, September 26-30, 2016. It comprises a two-day pre-conference for PhD students that is focused on item response theory and multilevel modeling as methodological approaches to evaluate differential accountability and effectiveness, and a 3-day main conference that presents research findings, current challenges, and developments in the context of the conference topic. The outcomes of this conference will be manifold and include (a) scholarly dissemination of the most important findings, discussions, and approaches by publishing a special issue in the journal "School Effectiveness and School Improvement", (b) public dissemination of the implications for school practice and educational policy-making, and (c) stimulating research collaboration and initiatives in Norway and internationally.