Special Issue of the International Journal of Disability, Development and Education (IJDDE)
Topic: “Illuminating the Black Box of School Reform to Improve Outcomes for All Students”
To be published: Volume 54, Issue 1, March 2007
Guest Editors: Dennis McDougall and Claude Goldenberg
As school reform efforts around the world continue to develop and mature, demands and expectations evolve. In past decades, improving average achievement was cause for celebration, but educators now look to improve outcomes for all students and all groups of students, including those with disabilities, those from diverse cultural and language backgrounds, and those from economically disadvantaged homes and communities. Moreover, educators and researchers now seek to understand the actual mechanisms of school reform rather than simply identifying inputs and outputs. Effective schools and practices have been identified, but what does it take to get from “here” to “there”, that is, to improve schools and schooling? Must conditions be in place before substantive reforms can begin? If so, what are these conditions and how are they recognised? How is reform initiated, sustained, and ultimately institutionalised?
This Special Issue of IJDDE spotlights international efforts to reform schools. It also seeks to illuminate the “black box” – the inner workings and details of school reform efforts intended to improve important educational outcomes for all students. We are especially interested in empirical articles that report data on interventions and their documented effects on important student outcomes. These articles should address how and why schools improve – or fail to improve. We also welcome articles that report findings from interventions that produced disappointing or mixed results, as long as the authors analyse data in ways that expand knowledge about school reform. We invite detailed syntheses of programmes of research in school reform based on previously published or unpublished papers. All submissions must relate clearly to the theme of this special issue.
Guidelines for Submission:
Authors should submit manuscripts via mail or e-mail. Each manuscript should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words, word-processed in English, and conform to guidelines of the 5th Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2001). The Guest Editors welcome queries from potential authors prior to manuscript submission. IJDDE is a peer-reviewed journal and thus every article included in this special issue will go through the customary peer review process before publication.
Submission Deadline for Manuscripts: 15 May, 2006
Please send manuscripts via mail or e-mail (preferred), or request of further details to:
Dennis McDougall, Guest Editor, 124 Wist Hall, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA mcdougal@hawaii.edu