Pre-Application Meeting Videos and TranscriptsApril 22, 2002
DR. SWEET: Thanks, Russ. We also have another new person who has joined OERI and actually she is the Senior Research Adviser to the Assistant Secretary. Her name is Valerie Reyna. Let me tell you a little bit about her.
She came to us, prior to coming here she was Professor of Surgery Medicine in Biomedical Engineering, Mexican/American studies and women's studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson before joining us here. She, too, is published widely and she's probably best known for her research on false memories in children and risque decision making in youth. While she was at Arizona you may be interested to know that among other appointments she served as a member of the Arizona Governor's Task Force on Education Reform and, interestingly, she has a permanent membership on the Study Sections of the National Institutes of Health.
So, here again, we're very privileged to have with us Valerie Reyna. And if she would come on up here so that we can get a look at her we'd appreciate it.
DR. REYNA: Thank you so much. Welcome, indeed, to all of you. We just came, as a matter of fact, this morning from the very first panel meeting of our new era here at OERI, the first panel meeting of reviewers who are reviewing the applications to the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Program. So, this has been quite an auspicious day for us.
You know, as we think about the probability of success of the endeavors that we're engaged in there really are two major factors that determine whether anything we do here will matter at all and the first major factor is you. Without quality research submitted to this organization there's very little we can do. We really, we work on the margins essentially and the real content of what we do is the research, the quality of the research applications that we receive. So, you play a very crucial role.
And the other key factor really is the quality of the peer review. And we have entirely revamped the peer review process from bottom to top and we conserved things that have worked in the past and added new things based on our experience with other organizations. I think you'll find that this process is probably more akin to a process you might be familiar with at NIH or NSF from now on. So, welcome and it's really wonderful that you took the time to be here.
Now, I'm going to give some general remarks and then the really informative remarks are going to be given after me by Anne Sweet and others, but let me give you a little bit of context for this competition. As I've alluded this is really a new OERI in many ways. Not that people haven't been toiling in the wilderness doing highly rigorous scientific research, they certainly have in the past and particularly in the area of reading comprehension and OERI has certainly over the years, long before we arrived, supported a lot of good work.
However, I think it's safe to say that we have a renewed emphasis on scientific rigor currently and a new breeze is blowing through OERI and you're part of it, you're part of that first wave. I also think we have a combination of circumstances that makes what you do even more important than it would ordinarily be as a scientific event and that is we have an unprecedented receptivity to research in the nation's capital.
As you probably know we've recently passed landmark legislation, this is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and in that research scientifically based research, that phrase is mentioned over one hundred times in the legislation, and the idea is that practice is supposed to be based on research evidence. That's where you come in, you provide the evidence on which educational practice is supposed to be based. And that particular piece of legislation had bipartisan support. It had support, of course, with the President and the First Lady and so on, but it also had bipartisan support in Congress.
So, the work that you do, there is a receptiveness out there in the classrooms and in the field and among the minds of the policymakers that's unprecedented. This has not happened before. So, this is the moment to seize. So, please send us good applications because we intend to do something with it and to apply it in the classroom.
In that legislation there is a definition of scientific research and it's a pretty stringent definition of scientific research. Some people have been concerned that it might be too narrow. I would encourage you to go back to your universities and to your schools and to think about things in the following way. We certainly could quibble, we could argue about the nuances of that definition of scientific research. However, I think it's far more productive to keep our eye on the big picture. And the big picture is that there's an encouragement to do high quality rigorous work and that research is now seen as essential to practice in the classroom. That's the big picture.
And I think I can assure you that OERI recognizes that there are a variety of valid methods that can be used in high quality scientific research and I think the proof is in the pudding and the proof is in the Federal Register Notice. And if you notice, we certainly could have excluded certain kinds of methods and we did not do that. We could have done it, but we chose not to do it and I think that speaks volumes about what we think is important and our approach.
So, the details, I think, are things that scholars can work out and I think debate is healthy and constructive but, again, the main message is very, very positive here and we should not lose sight of that. I think we have other kinds of unprecedented conditions that operate now.
And Russ just left so we can talk about him and embarrass him, but let's go right ahead. We have un precedented leadership in this office. We have someone in Russ Whitehurst who is a bona fide scholar and scientist, someone who has actually done research himself. And there's a quality of leadership provided by that that just has not, in terms of research credentials per se, that is, you know, tremendously helpful to everything we do.
You know about the Summit on Cognitive Development that was held at the White House. How many people have heard about that? You did, oh, thank you in the back. Hey, all right. They had a summit. To begin with they had a Summit on Cognitive Development in the White House. Pinch me. And, in addition to that, the speakers were primarily researchers. Again, this is a signal that you and what you do is viewed as essential to the enterprise. So, I think that's extremely important.
I think it's extremely important, too, that we emphasize the research expertise, the quality of the science and that's extremely important. Obviously, for most of us there's a sense of urgency about the problems that are occurring in the classroom today. We want to do something about what's happening. The students who are going down for the third time, they're drowning out there right now, their lives are being forever altered by the quality or lack of quality of the education that they're getting.
So, many of us, myself included, feel a tremendous sense of urgency about that and I hope you do, too, because you should feel a sense of urgency about it and you can do something about it in today's climate. I think in order, though, to be effective we mustn't lose sight of something that we often take for granted, quality of the research. In our rush towards relevance we sometimes forget that low quality, highly relevant work doesn't help anyone. We must have high quality, high scientific merit in the work that we do and educational relevance and significance.
So, we've asked you to do something some people say is impossible, namely to marry high scientific merit, theoretically informed, empirically driven research with educationally relevant, educationally significant research. We've asked you to do both of those things together. That's very, very hard.
One of the tips I would give you is make sure you have a lot of depth on the bench in your partnerships in order to accomplish those two very challenging things, to bring those two very challenging things together. And this is just advice, you know, this is, you know, it's not in the notice, feel free to ignore it, but just advice from someone who's been around a while and done a lot of reviewing and so on and so forth.
There are people whose strengths will be in understanding the classroom and I would encourage you to put people like that on your research team. There will be other people whose strengths will be that they have a long track record of peer reviewed publications in reading comprehension that are empirically sound. Not just opinion pieces but, in fact, worked with actual data. I would encourage you to put those kinds of people on your research team because I think it will take people with an expertise in both.
How am I doing on time? I'm okay? All right, you're going to give me the hook, right, when I...
DR. SWEET: Okay.
DR. REYNA: That's your, hey, listen, very important.
Also I should briefly talk a little bit about the research initiative. So, I haven't covered this, right? The current research initiative. So, how many people have heard of IERI? I'm doing a little marketing research while I'm here, while I have you here. Thank you. Great, a lot of people have. The Interagency Educational Research Initiative. This has been ongoing for some time. There is currently, I think, an RFP out for that. Mark Constance is the contract person for that here at OERI. That is focusing on scaling up things that work and OERI is going to be taking probably a more salient leadership role in that partnership. That's in conjunction with the National Science Foundation and with NICHD.
We also have a very important panel that we've just appointed. the National Language Minority Panel which will be summarizing extant research on literacy and language development in students who are learners of English and I think this particular panel could play a very important role. As you know, the demographics of the country are changing. We're in a new era in terms of demographics and this research is highly uneven in its current quality and it's really crying out for a very critical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of what we currently know and the ability to set a high priority agenda for further research.
So, we're really going to be looking to that committee, and there's a lot of distinguished scholars on it, to really set an agenda and set a tone for direction of research in the future in an area that we think is extremely important.
Another area is cognition in student learning. We just had the competition for that close and we're in the process of evaluating applications. That will be continuing next year we anticipate with expanded funding as will the reading comprehension competition.
We also have a number of ideas that we're considering that have to do with character education and the development of pro social behavior, of math and, mathematics, the development of mathematical proficiency. That is a, you know, like reading there was a period where we had to make a case for the essential aspect of reading. It seems obvious that reading is important but, in fact, exactly how important and documenting that as a national priority was an argument that took, you know, a number of years to make and then when the data started coming in that, of course, assisted the argument tremendously.
There isn't as coherent an argument that has been made yet in terms of mathematical literacy, but obviously it is a gatekeeper to economic self-sufficiency in today's knowledge based economy. Many professions require a level of mathematical sophistication and analytical reasoning that just hasn't been true in the past. So, it's extremely important that more students reach higher levels of proficiency in that area. We've just had a Rand Report that has been released, a draft that's on the Web. Feel free to look it up and comment on that. We would be delighted to hear what you have to say.
We've also been looking at a comprehensive school forum and ways to try to gather our portfolio research so that we can get more out of that and, in fact, look at that in a more coherent, more systematic dare I say theory driven way about mechanism. And, in fact, underlying a lot of what I've been saying is this initiative toward research that is more directed at causal hypotheses, at the nature of the mechanism.
And I would strongly encourage you to consider that in your applications for research, not only what works and what's effective with empirically found methods to ascertain that, but in addition, how it works and why it works, the mechanism by which things are affected and exactly what's being affected and why.
And one of the many reasons to have research that is driven by an investigation into mechanism is by understanding mechanism we have a much better idea of how to apply this research in the classroom. If you know how something works you can say, yes, these are the conditions that you have to conserve in order for this to be effective and these are the things, like the color of the wallpaper, that are unimportant because they're not causally relevant.
So, in closing let me again welcome you and let you know how crucial you are to the enterprise. This is, again, our first application on reading comprehension and we expect this to be a continuing event, but you are the first cohort. So, what you put in your applications, believe me, will be read carefully not only for the sake of competition for the grants, but in terms of the arguments that you make. I promise you I will be reading these. So, wax eloquent and explain why the work is significant and I will be reading those things very, very carefully as will the leadership. So, thank you again and thank you for coming.
Pre-Application Meeting Videos and Transcripts
This page last modified May 30, 2002 (jer)