Suchergebnisse

The results of students at different basic and secondary schools vary largely in the Czech Republic compared to other countries, and there is a strong connection between the results of students and family background. The Czech education system is also highly stratified, and student tracking begins at a young age. In this respect the most controversial element in the system are the multi-year gymnasia, the existence of which is nonetheless strongly supported by the public. This support is based on the conviction that multi-year gymnasia provide the most talented students with a good education, enable more rapid cognitive development for these students, and thus help cultivate Czech elites. This article sets out to verify whether multi-year gymnasia genuinely fulfi l the function associated with them. Hypotheses about the role of multi-year gymnasia are tested using data from the OECD PISA 2000 and OECD PISA 2006 surveys, the PISA-L longitudinal survey, and Higher Education Studies 2004 survey. The main analytic methods used are multi-level modelling and logistic regression.

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of the structure of the Czech education system on the development of the relationship between a student's achievement and his/her family background. It compares the strength of the relationship between student achievement and a student's family background in various stages of his/her education career (grades 4, 8 and 10) in the Czech Republic and in systems without early tracking that also exhibit high student performance (Canada, Nordic countries). In addition, the paper tests a hypothesis that systems with different levels of tracking differ not only in their structure but also in teaching methods and teachers' attitudes. The analysis was conducted on data sets from the IEA PIRLS 2001, the IEA TIMSS 1999, and the OECD PISA 2003.

Since 1989, the Czech educational community has had very limited experience with education measurement. Comparative data on education outcomes were not available at either the national or the international level. In the 1990s, the situation changed dramatically. The Czech Republic joined international organizations specializing in comparative studies & several international enterprises in the field of education measurement. Consequently, there appeared also the first attempts to address the issue nationally. In this article, the author gives an overview of the international large-scale surveys on educational achievement that have taken place in the Czech Republic since 1990 & summarizes their main findings. At the end of the article, the author provides brief information about the national initiatives in this field. Within a short time period, the surveys produced extremely rich data sources of very good quality. The aim of the article is to inform the scientific community about these sources, to raise interest among its members in using them in their own research, & thus to contribute to their further exploitation.