Abstract
This overview study summarizes the history of the Czech Educational Research Association (CAPV) from 1992 to 2022, and is the opening chapter of a scientific monograph on the thirtieth anniversary of the association. It consists of five parts.
The first part of the chapter describes the formation of CAPV, its initial activities and the context in which the new association was created. The mission of the association was and is the improvement of the educational process through educational research, mutual exchange of information among educational researchers, dissemination of results of educational research and their practical application.
The second part of the chapter introduces younger members to important external changes that have affected the long-term functioning of CAPV and Czech educational research. These included the abolition of the J.
A. Comenius Institute of Pedagogy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, the only basic research institute, and the abolition of four departmental institutes by the Minister of Education and the subsequent establishment of a single joint departmental institute.
Educational research in the Czech Republic lost its institutional base by these reorganisation steps and its personnel base was considerably weakened. The third part of the chapter summarises useful internal CAPV activities: publication of the CAPV Bulletin, development of the CAPV Code of Ethics and its implementation in practice, meetings of the representatives of the five main Czech pedagogical journals, and the awarding of CAPV prizes for publications of outstanding quality.
The fourth part of the chapter presents the main programme objectives of CAPV and summarises the problems that have accompanied their implementation from the beginning of the association to the present day. These objectives were: to create an information bank on Czech educational research, to establish an information network for coordinating Czech educational research, to assess the quality of Czech educational research, to influence Czech educational policy, to nurture young scholars, and to respond professionally to the distortions of school reality in the domestic media.
The fifth part describes and comments on the changes in the national system of evaluation of those publication outputs that are the result of basic and applied research in various fields of scholarship. This is because the changed method of evaluation was followed by a changed method of funding research institutions.
In summary, CAPV has undergone a search for its own identity, a period of instability and a period of orientation to new conditions related to the change in education and research legislation. It is entering a period when it is aware of its possibilities and responsibility for the future development of Czech educational research.