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

In establishing the seven priorities, the Assistant Secretary and the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board challenge Americans in every walk of life to get involved in the process of educational improvement and to take greater responsibility for results.

Learners of all ages can find ways to reflect upon and communicate their own educational experiences, using the seven priorities to focus their thoughts. They might begin simply by describing times in their lives when they have learned something-in or out of school. They can read and interpret these narratives together. In this way, the priorities can become the basis for conversations with classmates and teachers about how they learn, and how schools and schooling might be changed so that they learn more. In the process, students can play a role in ensuring that learning is at the center of all reform efforts.

Parents can become critical consumers of research as well by taking a look at their communities and schools through the lens of the priorities. Are efforts under way, in each of the seven areas, to strengthen policy and practice? Are the new programs or initiatives being tried in their children's early care and education programs rooted in research? What kinds of research are being supported by the district or the school? Does this research ask important questions aligned with the national priorities? Can it lead to educational improvement at the local school? To what extent are parents' perspectives on research needs taken into account? Can the research design be changed to tap parents' knowledge and reflect their concerns?

Teachers, including those involved in early care and adult education, can use the priorities as a framework for their efforts to continuously improve their own practice, and to contribute to school- and district-wide improvement efforts. They can broaden their own concept of teaching to encompass research, which can mean visiting another teacher's class; keeping a journal to document what they are doing day by day in their classrooms; using research to help them make decisions about their teaching; or making a more systematic effort to relate the ups and downs of their students' performance to their own curricular and instructional decisions. They can take part in action research, using the research questions in this document as the basis for improvements in their own classrooms or as a springboard for conversations with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators about how the gap between research and practice can be narrowed.

Teachers can also be active, demanding, and critical consumers of research. This requires gaining the skills needed to evaluate and access research in libraries and on the Internet and to judge the quality of the information located. This can also include reaching out to other teachers, schools, professional associations, universities, and government agencies for help in locating and applying research findings relevant to their classrooms and students.

College and university faculty can urge or initiate research and development that is aimed at improving learning and teaching at the postsecondary level by using the national education research priorities plan as a starting point. They can engage graduate students from every discipline in research on strategies for effectively transmitting the knowledge base in their field to students and colleagues. They can give newcomers the tools and inspiration they need to advance the field. Professors in the liberal arts can collaborate with colleagues in schools of education to get a sense of how pedagogical principles might be appropriately modeled in and adapted for college classrooms. Postsecondary institutions can also collaborate with employers on research aimed at improving adult education and job training. Faculty of schools of education, in concert with colleagues in the liberal arts and sciences, can work with early care and education providers and K-12 teachers and administrators to refine, implement, or challenge the research generated on campus.

Administrators at every level can make research geared to educational improvement part of the daily life of their programs, schools, or institutions, rather than a special project or an occasional activity. Searching for ways to improve student achievement can become part of every administrator's job description. Using the national priorities as a framework, administrators can assure that teachers and parents have access to the research needed to design professional development and learning activities. They can make use of research findings as they work to strengthen their school's (or district's) organization, governance, support services, programs for special populations, and community and parent involvement.

Community leaders can become more familiar with research each of the seven priority areas, particularly findings that have bearing on their communities. They can help to publicize key findings, so that the full range of learning organizations--early care and education centers, schools, after-school programs, recreational programs, postsecondary institutions, job training programs, and other community organizations--can benefit from what has been discovered about teaching and learning. They can help communities move toward the day when local newspapers looking for front page news, clergy preparing weekly sermons, block associations seeking a theme for the next meeting, and parenting groups looking forward to their next get-together, all draw upon education research. Community leaders can motivate and help all of these organizations to document and exchange their own experiences for the benefit of the learners for whom they share responsibility.

Political leaders and policy makers can recognize research as an ongoing, continuous function of educational institutions and other settings where people learn. They can make policy that strengthens the capacity of people and organizations to contribute to educational improvement. Leaders can help to bring together many constituencies with a view toward developing a shared understanding of what constitutes quality in various realms of educational practice. Policy makers can also strengthen efforts to ground their decision making in both qualitative and quantitative research.

Education researchers can use the seven priorities to guide and inspire their own investments of energy and resources. The priorities are not prescriptive, but are meant to suggest areas of research that hold promise for strengthening achievement and building upon what we know. Researchers also can address three broad methodological challenges that span all seven priorities. First, in view the of growing prominence of qualitative research, methodological frameworks protocols, criteria, strategies, languages-need to be developed that can help us compare, synthesize, and draw lessons from diverse studies even when they chronicle very different kinds of experience or represent very different categories of data. Second, approaches need to be developed that integrate quantitative and qualitative research. On one hand, we need to know to what extent the specific stories we tell represent broad patterns or important, instructive deviations from those patterns. On the other hand, we need to be sure that all accounts of learners acknowledge them as complex people who develop and learn in particular settings, not as ciphers or achievement machines. The third challenge is to develop approaches to research that resonate for both national and local policy and practice. A research effort that focuses on, or seeks to benefit, the school around the corner should not be trivialized or devalued. Chances are, the school around the corner encounters most of the problems facing American education today. The problem is that current research offers few effective tools for linking studies that focus on educational context in particular settings with studies that document patterns of experience across many settings.

Leaders of professional associations can help practitioners at every level bridge research and practice. They can help support studies in their field or discipline that hold promise for improving practice and can lead coordinated efforts to translate those studies into curricula, instructional strategies, and standards for what learners should know and be able to do in a particular content area. They can contribute to professional development efforts, providing assistance to teachers in their field as they seek to become more active producers and consumers of research.

Union leaders, as they advocate for teachers and other school personnel, can promote an expanded notion of the teacher's function to include ongoing research and development linked to school improvement. They can play a leading role in the search for ways to organize the school day and the school year so that teachers have the time and resources they need to take part in research, development, and innovation.

Business leaders can ensure that national and local research efforts are grounded in the realities learners will face in tomorrow's workplace. They can ensure that educational efforts in their own organizations are based on solid research methods and techniques used in providing training initiatives, literacy and family support programs, and on-line information or educational services that can be drawn from education research. Business leaders can marshal the resources of their organizations to support and advance educational research and development through such measures as large-scale, multisite efforts, action research in local schools, and community-based efforts. And they can form research-oriented partnerships with other learning institutions, including community colleges, research universities, cultural institutions, schools, and community organizations.

Corporations and philanthropic organizations that fund educational initiatives can work toward consensus on criteria for high-quality educational research and development building on national priorities. They can encourage researchers to address the methodological issues described above, ensuring in particular that the efforts they fund resonate for large populations but yield benefits for local programs as well. They can convene meetings and issue publications that bring together many stakeholders in education to discuss the goals, strategies, uses, and risks of research and development. In addition, they can play a role in disseminating and replicating successful initiatives.

Journalists working in every medium can report more frequently and more fully on educational research efforts. While addressing specific findings and their relevance to their audiences, they can help their readers, viewers, or listeners get a better grasp of how educational research can strengthen communities and the nation as a whole. Focusing on the complete set of national priorities, or focusing on single priorities, they can give human faces to the numbers or trends that often seem so remote from Americans' everyday concerns. The media can make a contribution not only by publicizing the results of other people's studies, but also by contributing to research efforts. Many have a substantial research capacity, as well as sizable stores of information such as audience surveys, journalists' observations, and tape or photo evidence. Journalists who interpret research to the public have a special responsibility to understand research findings, their context, their meaning, and their implications for local school improvement efforts.

OERI, the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, and the U.S. Department of Education can lead a national conversation so that everyone involved in the nation's educational enterprise can help to broaden public understanding of the importance of high quality educational research. In addition to sponsoring scientifically rigorous work, OERI can be the catalyst for bold theories and methods that challenge current assumptions. OERI and the Department will use research stimulated by these priorities to help design their own programs and services. OERI, the Board, and the Department will synthesize and disseminate results so that local efforts to improve teaching and learning are informed by reliable high quality evidence.

OERI will work with its partners in the ten regional educational laboratories, the national research and development centers, the ERIC clearinghouses, and other funded programs to determine what implications the priorities have for the future work of these components of the federally-supported research and development infrastructure. This will allow the nationwide system of laboratories, centers, clearinghouses, and other research and development support programs to play an important strategic role in designing and conducting the research and development demanded by these priorities, in developing practical applications of the research, by producing research-based policy proposals, and in disseminating research and research-based solutions to every school and classroom in the nation.

We all can lend voice to the twin tenets that underlie educational research. First, with enough well informed instruction, well targeted resources, and support from parents, teachers, and community members every child can learn. Second, with enough well informed policy, well targeted resources, and support from communities, government agencies, and a wide range of public- and private-sector organizations, every educational institution can improve. In short, we can express confidence in the nation's learners and educational institutions.
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[Adult Competence]

[Epilogue: Powerful Questions]