November/December 2003
Can Educators and Researchers Really Work Together to Improve Learning?
A new report proposes a national plan for education R&D
By Michael Sadowski
When Pat Morgan, mathematics coordinator for Oklahoma's Moore Independent School District, considered changing the middle school algebra curriculum, she knew she needed hard evidence to show teachers that any new program would really make a difference. So Morgan conducted an experiment in which 224 students switched to the Carnegie Learning Corporation's Cognitive Tutor Algebra I ...
A thousand miles away, in the quintessential college town of Ann Arbor, University of Michigan researcher Annemarie Palincsar is trying to figure out how to provide teachers with professional development around Reciprocal Teaching (RT) ...
What if the details of Morgan's study could be provided to educators beyond her district and used to build upon previous research knowledge in algebra instruction? What if the support existed for RT to be piloted in a range of schools and, if the initial findings bore out, it could become a widely used strategy for teaching reading to students with poor comprehension skills? What if funding were provided for large-scale professional-development experiences to share best practices like RT?
Such links between education research and school practice probably seem natural to outsiders-and utopian to anyone who has followed the disjointed relationship between research and practice over the years. Yet these are among the collaborations envisioned in an ambitious new proposal for a Strategic Education Research Partnership ...
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.
"Research I Can Sink My Teeth Into"
Making the Research-Practice Partnership Work
By Michael Sadowski
English teacher Warren Wolfe has his doubts about much of the education research he has seen over the years: "I can read research reports until the cows come home, but until the gap is bridged between research and practice-between data and something specific that I can change in my classroom-there's a real disconnect."
Wolfe may therefore seem an unlikely candidate for a working partnership with a Harvard researcher. But he is one of about two dozen teachers at Evanston (Ill.) Township High School involved in the Tripod Project, based on work by Ronald Ferguson of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to combat the underachievement of minority (primarily African American and Latino) K-12 students
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.
New and Noteworthy
Latino Achievement in America: How to Close the Gap
Despite the continuing gap in academic achievement between Latino students and their white peers nationwide, some schools, districts, and states are making notable progress in closing the gap, according to a recent summary and analysis of test scores compiled by the Education Trust ...
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.
Insights
Linking Teachers with Technology
Online courses and communities provide ways of delivering professional development and support
By David T. Gordon
The task of providing education professionals with high-quality staff development has taken on fresh urgency since the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which mandates improvements in the nation's teaching corps. ... Thanks to improvements in desktop systems, Internet connections, digital audio and video, web conferencing, and more, the potential for creating a wide-scale professional knowledge base for teachers has never been greater.
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.
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