About the project
OCCAM educated the next generation of educational researchers. It aimed to investigate the effects of educational policy, focusing on trends and differences in educational achievement, the determinants of educational outcomes, and changes in educational outcomes from an international perspective. International large-scale studies on student achievement (ILSA) in mathematics, reading, and science have been conducted since the late 1960s. However, in the past, the data from these studies have been used almost exclusively for cross-sectional comparisons. OCCAM went beyond the state of art by shifting the focus from cross-sectional correlation to longitudinal trend analysis on a country level.
The funding was used to employ and support 15 PhDs, including providing them with regular network meetings and workshops. Each PhD was employed at one of the partner institutions, but all of them had extensive stays at another institution (six months) as part of their training.
Two of the PhDs was employed at CEMO, starting August 2018. Jelena Veletic used data from mainly PISA and TALIS to study how school leadership fosters conditions for and results in learning outcome. Ye Wangqiong used data from several ILSA to study how instructional quality may affect the conditions for performance and equity
Objectives
The OCCAM research program entailed two categories of interrelated objectives:
- To gain a deeper understanding of how to describe and compare international trends relating to educational outcomes.
- To extend existing theories on educational effectiveness regarding the effects of a large set of policy-related issues.
Sub-projects
Financing
The OCCAM ETN project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant number 765400.
