Educational sciences : national and international aspects

I am sitting in a large auditorium (A 280) in the University of Geneva in Switzerland on a Saturday morning in September 2010. The room is filled with people who are involved in different ways in a large European research project of the 7th Framework Programme for Research in the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities Theme (SSH), called EERQI–European Educational Research Quality Indicators. The goals of the EERQI project are to reinforce and enhance the worldwide visibility and competitiveness of European educational research. More specifically, the project aims to: (1) develop new indicators and methodologies to determine the quality of educational research publications; (2) propose a prototype framework for establishing such indicators and methodologies; (3) make this framework operational on a multilingual basis (starting with English, German, French and Swedish); (4) produce a search and query engine for resource harvesting and text analysis; (5) test the transferability of the EERQI indicators to other fields in the Social Sciences and the Humanities; and (6) develop a sustainability plan for the quality assessment of European educational research publications. The project hopes to improve the current standards of research quality indicators, especially for the fields of the Social Sciences and the Humanities (see the homepage http://www.eerqi.eu/)