DR. EARLE: My task if twofold, first to reflect for no more than a couple of minutes on sort of what we have heard today or at least what I have heard today and secondly to talk to you a little bit about some follow-up that we anticipate.

I think for me at least this meeting has been very interesting and productive in a number of ways. We are pleased I think that we have got set of people with diverse expertise and that we have a diverse set of participants from universities, from funding agencies, from R&D groups.

So, I think that has really helped the conversation to move forward and I also think that I was encouraged by something I heard very early on in the day that this meeting is about a third way and so that kind of stuck in my mind and I kept hearing various iterations of that as the day went on, that we need randomized controlled studies to test interventions, but we have to be careful about identifying the quality of those interventions and that they are significant interventions and not poorly designed and that it is a more nuanced conversation that I was hearing today than some of the times that I attend meetings of this kind.

When are interventions at an appropriate point to develop and warrant broader scale implementation and then another set of comments that focused around the importance of looking at curricular and instructional strategies but then amendments to continue to look at some of the systemic factors such as knowledge utilization affects issues and the use of personnel in school districts that were not focused completely on curriculum and instruction.

I, also, thought it was very interesting that quantitative/qualitative conversation that I was listening to particularly not so much in opposition to but which approaches go together, which qualitative approaches go best with which quantitative approaches and I think that all this has really left me thinking that there is a lot of richness in this multiple methods set of issues that we will probably want to continue to probe.

I was very taken in listening to the background with trying to connect to problems of practice and in the breakout sessions and in the section with Pat Forgione and in the one that I attended at least which was the one on the mathematics curriculum the issue that was under discussion was not whether a particular curriculum is effective and that effectiveness depends on so many other kinds of factors, that it depends on what your goals are for students; it depends on the capacity of your teachers. It depends on where your schools and school districts are trying to go. It depends on whether or not you can administer various interventions with any kind of fidelity or whether there is a capacity to adapt interventions to fit current situations.

So, again I think this is really all about a more nuanced conversation. I was, also, very taken with the comments in Pat Forgione's session where you know he has got political factors driving him and so decisions are going to be made whether there is data to support them or not. I think this is something that we really have to think about and figure out how to help those in schools and in districts and in states who know when an intervention is in reasonable enough shape, if you will to go ahead and try some things or when you need to hold back and wait for more information and when you can go with other kinds of information that you may have.

The issues on training, I thought it was very interesting and I am very pleased to hear that there are some programs that are seriously thinking about combining the way we think about training graduate students to be more comfortable with all kinds of methodologies and I thought the notion of the apprenticeship idea was also one that holds great potential for moving us forward in terms of giving people experiences in doing different kinds of research using different kinds of methods, and so to wrap up I just wanted to mention a couple of things that we will be following up. The first is that the transcript of all the talks that you heard here, is it the same site for the transcript, will it be on the National Academy of Sciences Center for Education web site? Okay, the National Academy of Sciences Center for Education web site, and if there is anything you missed or feel like hearing again you can go there to get the transcript and secondly as we were thinking about next steps one of the thoughts was that this is designed to be as interactive as it can be in such a large group but that hopefully you have ideas about next steps and so what we are going to ask you to do is send them to this e-mail address and the planning group reconvene at some undetermined moment but not in the too far distant future. So, any thoughts that you have I think these things are always best when fresh. So, perhaps in the next few days you will e-mail your suggestions and your thoughts to us so that we can take all that into account as we think about what possibly might be coming next.

So, thank you very much for your attendance. I at least have enjoyed the day a great deal and I hope that you did, too.

Thank you.