Education research & development, CV, publications, references

About me

Kalman Bekesi

I work as an education researcher. (After many years I had spent on searching for the meaning of life I finally restricted my field of interest to education.) I have been participating in and leading research projects within the European Union. Most recently I am involved in mixed-method research (case studies, scale-validation, survey). I have spent a semester at the University of London to learn how to conduct systematic reviews and am working on taking it into practice.

This homepage contains the main information about my works and contacts.

Keywords about my work are the following: evidence-based education, evidence-informed education, development, education change, innovation in education, qualitative and quantitative methods, mixed education research methodology, case study, survey, interview, observation; school level, local level, policy level.

REACH: Readiness for Change of Schools. A validated Self-Efficacy Scale.
Evidence-Informed School Improvement in Hungary. With Some Comparative Studies from Finland and Belgium.

Articles

The door of an open classroom in a town-school. Photo: Kalman.

REACH: Developing Assessment Tool on the Readiness for Change of Schools (from 2011, in progress)

In what extent are schools ready to change? This simple question arises many times, when someone intends to inform policy-makers so as to foster the implementation of innovations in the school system, or also when someone intends to provide specific schools with useful information for local improvement purposes.

In 2011 we validated and then pilot tested a self-efficacy scale specifically designed for schools (ISCED 1,2), in order to develop a tool for assessing the extent of the readiness for change.

Some results are:

We have a three factor scale having high level validity and good reliability.
We have a short, one-scale questionnaire to assess the self-efficacy on openness, readiness to change.

For more information please navigate to the menu "Recent Projects".

Leader of the project: Kalman Bekesi. Co-researcher: Sandor Rozsa, Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Hungary, Budapest.

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The books on the principal's 'main' shelf are mostly about management and efficiency in a best practice town school. This is much different from schools not using evidence, where found that the contents of books on the principals' shelves are mainly about curriculum, teaching methods and the national regulation of the education system.

Evidence-informed School Improvement in Hungary, 2009-2012 (with some comparative studies from the EU)

Who do use evidence on school and local level? What kind of evidence do they use? In which phases of improvement, innovation? With an excellent group of researchers with great school-development and research experience we investigated the links between available data, information, evidence and decisions on improvement of schools. We conducted our research on two levels: school and local education policy-making.

Some results of the project are:

Instead of single processes we found that the whole school as an organization, system can be the key of evidence-informed school improvement. We found in Hungary the quality management system of the school to be the most important factor in the visited schools.
Using evidence in the school or by the local policy-makers does not directly or inevitably leads to improvements, innovation.
"Using evidence" in innovative schools means constructing locally applicable knowledge based on, or informed by a mass of evidence.

For more information please navigate to the menu "Recent Projects".

I co-lead this project from 2009 to 2011 and helped the dissemination up to the beginning of 2012. It was run under the Social Renewal Operational Programme (TáMOP) 3.1.1 which was fund by the EU, in the Hungarian Institute for Education Research and Development (HIERD), Department of Research.

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