A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

I am a strong believer in classroom-based research. I became convinced when a colleague and I developed a 12th-grade course that integrated mathematics and physics instruction. Data that we gathered over a period of four years demonstrated that the course significantly improved student performance and increased the demand for math and physics in our school. Our efforts helped gain community acceptance for interdisciplinary efforts in other subject areas, and the whole experience helped me become a better teacher.

Jacqueline Omland
High School Physics Teacher
Aberdeen, South Dakota

How does a society that wants to ensure its future survival and well-being educate its people? If we could accurately forecast the full range of issues our learners will confront in coming decades, if we could confidently predict the problems they will have to solve and the opportunities they will want to seize, we might be able to prescribe courses of study that would cover everything they will need to know in the 21st century.

But predictions about the future are notoriously perilous. Fifty years ago, some predicted that by the year 2000, Americans would be flying from place to place sporting personal jet packs. But they didn't foresee that fax machines and the Internet would make worldwide commerce and personal communication possible without leaving home. Fifty years ago, experts also predicted that the worldwide market for computers would be no more than a grand total of 10. They failed to predict that instead of getting bigger and bigger, computers would become smaller and smaller, not to mention cheaper and cheaper. They did not foresee the rapid spread of personal computers into schools and workplaces. They did not anticipate how dramatically computer-based technologies would transform our work lives-how we define our work, how we get it done, and how we interact with each other in the process.^l

Clearly, even our most flamboyant forecasts cannot contain the realities that our children and grandchildren will meet. Rather than tailoring schooling to our projections of what they will need, we must give them a firm grasp of basic skills and in-depth content-knowledge, and also the capacity to understand, analyze, and transform the conditions they will encounter. When we ask whether today's learners will be prepared to succeed in tomorrow's workplace, we have to take into account that tomorrow's workplace may not be a "place" at all, but rather an arena through which information will circulate, information to which workers will be expected to apply analytic effort.²

Where do today's students stand in relation to these challenges? Many Americans believe that, compared with the schools they attended when they were young, the nation's schools are in decline.³ The data show that on the whole, however, today's students are achieving about as well as students did a quarter century ago.⁴ This is no small achievement, considering that today's schools face higher hurdles than did schools of the past. The populations historically least successful in school--low-income children and racial or linguistic minorities--now constitute much larger numbers of school children than ever before and this trend is expected to intensify in coming years.⁵ Recent immigrants with limited English proficiency are entering our schools in record numbers. And while poverty levels for the nation as a whole have not changed significantly since the 1970s, the percent of children in poverty has grown, corresponding with declining economic prospects for young, poorly educated male workers, and the sharp increase in single-parent households.⁶ Under these circumstances, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that in most areas today's students are achieving at about the same levels as students tested in 1971. Moreover, students at all three age levels studied by the NAEP (ages 9, 13, and 17) appear to be learning more in mathematics and science, judging by modest increases in scores between 1982 and 1992. In contrast, reading and writing performance have stayed about the same.⁷

The bottom line is that nationwide, educational performance is holding steady in many areas of the curriculum and marginally improving in others. But considering the challenges that lie ahead, that is not nearly good enough. By the time they finish high school, most American students cannot complete writing samples that contain sufficient information to sustain an argument, and most students still grapple with challenging reading matter. The vast majority of high school seniors cannot synthesize and learn from specialized reading materials, nor can they solve multistep problems.⁸ In short, they lack precisely the skills that will be most highly valued and most highly rewarded in coming decades.

Where do we go from here? We begin by acknowledging the hard work and achievement too often obscured by a deluge of disappointing data. The fact that American schools have held the line academically over a quarter century despite very tough challenges reflects the dedication and determination of millions of teachers and parents and the efforts of millions of students across the nation. But we need research that contributes to new ideas and processes and leads to better solutions for America's learners in the coming century.

What kinds of investigation will meet the criteria of the scientific community, while moving the nation toward the goal of helping learners master basic skills, grasp in-depth content, and acquire the analytic and interpretive abilities they will need to succeed in the next century? During the deliberations that led up to the formulation of the national education research priorities, parents, researchers, and policy makers told us repeatedly that:

We Need High Quality Research With Results We Can Count On

The American education research enterprise also needs to seek strategic opportunities to support work that addresses difficult methodological issues and controversies and that advances the state of the art in research design. It also is important that the research community accept multiple conceptions of social science and be willing to test nonconventional methodologies.

New Strands of Research What works and why? What accounts for the properties of power and resilience? How can a process be duplicated or extended? In virtually every field of human endeavor, researchers ask questions like these. To answer them researchers have to confront the immense complexity of what makes a particular substance or strategy, problem or program unique. Case in point: spider silk. Researchers around the world, including American scientists at the Natick Research, Development and Engineering Center of the Army in Massachusetts, have been studying this remarkable material and have found that the delicate threads that make up a spider web are actually stronger than steel and more durable than nylon. Imagine the marvelous materials scientists could produce by analyzing and duplicating spiders' lightweight water-resistant, super-tough webs. For years, researchers have known the ingredients and composition of the fluid that spiders squirt through the hole in their backs. But to use this knowledge--to translate insights about spider silk into new, space-age materials--they need to know much more. What is it about the silk's molecular architecture that accounts for its toughness? What happens to that structure when the fluid is expelled into the open air and begins to dry? What stages does it go through in its evolution from a water-based fluid into a stable web of astonishing strength? What is the impact of temperature? What about pressure? As one scientist has commented, "We are still in a fundamental stage of research." Constrained by limited resources and an impatient public, education researchers have too often cut short this kind of inquiry. When a strategy or program boosts achievement, education researchers identify its basic ingredients and then attempt to reproduce it. But they sometimes are not given the time to develop a full understanding of which strands in the intricate web connect the specific program components with the particular learners, to explain its strength and durability. What is it about the way this effort was structured that accounts for its effectiveness? How has that structure evolved? How do the links among its many parts affect results? And how do crucial environmental factors :impinge on its success or failure? Like the silk scientists, educators are still in a fundamental stage of research. We know a great deal, but many of the most significant discoveries about learning and teaching lie ahead. As we edge toward a new century, teachers and other educational researchers need to pursue approaches that ask important questions, allow for sustained, responsible inquiry, recognize and accommodate complexity, and produce the kinds of knowledge that can improve results for all of our nation's learners.

We Need Research That Takes into Account the Real World Conditions in Which Teaching and Learning Take Place

We Need To Bridge the Gap Between Research and Practice

We Need Research That Treats Learning as a Lifelong Endeavor, and Reinforces Links Among Different Levels of Education

Research by itself does not always provide startling or transforming revelations. But research plays an absolutely crucial role in helping us understand our own educational experience in new ways so that all of us--teachers and parents, administrators and academics, policy makers, and concerned community members--can make the best possible decisions for our children, our communities, and our nation. To research is, after all, to take another look--to re-examine, through a different optic, the phenomena of learning and teaching. The best educational research helps us vault beyond practices or conditions that strike us as natural, necessary, and expected. Given different templates, we can see other patterns. Given different approaches, we can come up with different questions and better answers.

In summary, research is needed that meets the highest standards of scientific inquiry, but also is rooted in the everyday experience of students and teachers and the reality of schools. Research efforts can engage all of the people--academics and nonacademic alike-- who are concerned about strengthening education in all of the settings where learning takes place.
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[Prologue: What Do We Need to Know?]

[Chapter 2: An Agenda for the Nation]