Nearly four years ago, the government of his native Thailand asked Sirichai Kanjanawasee to help improve the country's educational system. That work has led to unique, mutually beneficial relationships between educators and researchers in Thailand and at the University of Oregon's College of Education.

Kanjanawasee, a education professor, spoke to students and faculty May 31 as part of the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy and Leadership's Colloquium Series.

The Ministry of Education for Thailand approached Kanjanawasee to take on a project that lasted from 2010 to 2012. He and the Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Education, of which he is dean, were asked to:

• Identify the weak points in the country's educational system;
• Develop and implement training for teachers and administrators that targeted those weaknesses;
• Evaluate the entire effort for effectiveness.

The government spent the equivalent of $10 million on the project as part of a larger push to improve Thailand's economy.

In the end, nearly half a million teachers and administrators from all over the country attended a week of training. Kanjanawasee and his team interpreted the resulting data and determined that the training was not significantly effective in the short-term; the achievement rating for each group of teachers that were trained was average or below average in most areas of the country.

But the participants reported that they derived value from the process, and the national effort connected schools and educational personnel in unexpected ways, paving the way for future collaboration, training and improvement.

The massive amounts of data generated by the project will continue to benefit researchers. Kanjanawasee's counterparts at the UO can benefit from studying the methods and techniques he and his faculty employed. The colloquium was an outgrowth of that research-based relationship, which will continue later this month with a cooperatively planned workshop series in Bangkok called UO-Chula. University of Oregon professors Akihito Kamata and Keith Zvoch will travel to the Chulalongkorn University campus to host the workshop series on quantitative methods.

The monthly Colloquium Series is on hiatus until the fall. The organizing committee comprises doctoral and other students, and faculty advisors from the College of Education. The purpose of the series is to "explore issues related to educational research, methodology, policy and leadership (by) allowing students, faculty and invited guests to engage in discussions about current issues, research programs and various paths in education."

- by Aaron Montoya, UO College of Education