Start: 15th January, 2018

End: 14th January, 2022

Large investments in educational reforms are being made across EU countries, but rarely do they prove to be effective at improving educational quality, therefore in order to implement a sound evidence-based educational policy a more thorough analysis of educational systems and their peculiarities is required.

Seeking to analyse the state of national education we initiate an interdisciplinary project to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of EU countries’ education systems. An integrated secondary analysis of the data of international studies of educational achievements (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, 2003-2018) and macro-data of the EU countries is being planned. For a more thorough analysis of Lithuanian education merging the databases of the assessment of achievements in lower secondary education (PUPP) with the state maturity examination (VBE) is to be done.

Combining the knowledge and competencies of social and physical sciences in this interdisciplinary project will enable us to find out what are the factors of effectiveness and efficiency of educational systems in EU countries. The proposed educational effectiveness and efficiency assessment model is grounded on optimization methods that enable saving recourses by reorienting them towards ways of improving educational quality that are most effective. Construction of the composite index of measuring effectiveness and efficiency will allow to monitor the development of education in EU countries and will contribute to the implementation of a more efficient educational policy.

The creation of unique database of national education will enable assessing the added value of Lithuanian schools in the areas like student achievements and social mobility. The development of the open code R package for the multilevel analysis of international educational data and optimization based methods, will provide researchers lacking a deeper statistical and programming knowledge with an opportunity to analyse complicated educational datasets.

This project will provide important grounds for further research of educational effectiveness and efficiency, whereas the development of interdisciplinary competencies of researchers and doctoral students will establish preconditions for Lithuanian scientists to be involved in a larger-scale international research activities.