MS. LEVINE: Let me just start by thanking the committee and Laurie and Lisa for both the creation of this workshop and inviting me to participate.

I find that, whenever I am asked to speak about issues related to doctoral education and training, it brings back fond memories of my dissertation defense, and that odd feeling of seeming, at once, an expert and a neophyte before a rather illustrious panel of senior scholars. I will try to deal with that role ambiguity and ambivalence as I offer my remarks.

In many respects, I think there are great commonalities in David's and my views, at least as I read his writing. I indeed admire his work, and, the more I read it, the more I admire it.

As David said, his job was to raise for us some of the issues that are distinct about doctoral training and education in education research, or such training, as it unfolds specifically in schools of education.

My job is to point out some of the commonalities between what I see to be the challenges between training in other scholarly fields, in particular, in the social and behavioral sciences, and how that stacks up with what is happening in graduate research training in schools of education. I guess, perhaps more bluntly, I will be the optimist, and he was a bit of the pessimist.

In these stage-setting remarks, I want to continue in tone and goal what David initiated. My hope in this session is to put some issues on the “table” that can help fuel discussion throughout the day. I think both of us found, when we started writing up our talking points—and we decided to eschew power point—that we moved from brief comments to what became longer narrative. So, I sculpted my commentary into a set of written remarks that I hope convey my thinking on these issues.

First, I want to address the high level of exceptionalist thinking that I believe besets education research and training for it.

Second, I want to discuss some of the key concerns regarding doctoral training in social and behavioral science fields, and how that connects to what is happening in doctoral research training in education.

Third, I want to outline some of the parallels between doctoral training in education research and in other professional fields, like social work, law, business, and nursing that also emanate from strong practicing traditions.

Fourth, I want to present a picture of what doctoral training in education research looks like, at least as I see it at this point in time, and the role and potential role of schools of education in that training.

Fifth and finally, I want to conclude by looking ahead to some potential steps for strengthening doctoral training in educational research.

Just to keep me honest, those were five issues, and we will see if I can go through them in the time allotted. On each issue, my remarks will be necessarily brief and illustrative, but I hope, along with David's presentation, that they help to stimulate, provoke, and define the territory for today's conversation and, indeed, the fuller conversation worthy of this committee’s attention.

Before starting today, I want to say what Laurie made reference to briefly; that is, that I have had the benefit of considerable input from across the social and behavioral sciences community, including the education research community.

As Laurie said, I was asked by the National Science Foundation to lead a team to provide strategic advice to NSF on education and training in the social and behavioral sciences, including educational research. This area really has had very little thought on the agenda of training in science, at least comparatively speaking.

As part of that exercise for NSF, and as background to the report, we convened a meeting of over 100 scholars, some of whom were there from the CORE committee, or otherwise are present in this audience. Therefore, a lot of these ideas that I am presenting today certainly had benefit of that input.

While my own background as a developmental social psychologist focused on children and youth, including in-school research, I am a relative recent insider to education research. Thus, I am still something of an observer of this terrain. Social psychologists, when we are not in our lab doing our experiments, of course, inherently “soak and poke” across contexts. My interdisciplinary proclivities make education research a fertile ground for thought.

Essentially, I see this arena of scholarship and training as beset by exceptionalist thinking. Typically, education research is treated as an activity separate and distinct from scientific fields dedicated to the study of other social institutions and their organizational structures, actors, processes, and impacts—for example, economics and its focus on the economy, political science on the polity, or criminal justice on the justice system.

What seems analogous at the level of discovery and application in the study of other social institutions often seems to be considered unique or idiosyncratic to education research. Like education research, these social and behavioral science fields are all concerned about relevance, predictive power, and the rigor of their work. Peer review, knowledge accumulation, what constitutes theoretical or methodological precision, and how best to make translations and applications are significant issues for all science.

One of the major benefits that I see of the NRC Committee on Research in Education—and I had not realized this was the last of your workshops—is that you have addressed critical issues in education research, but you have also put them in that larger context. In so doing, I think you have contributed to transcending some of that exceptionalist orientation.

Education research as an enterprise and the training of education researchers face challenges that are not exceptional or unique. Some flow from the history and development of the field, but every field has its intellectual history and special challenges.

David well outlined these complexities today, and in his ER piece on “The Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers.”

He notes that much of the scholarship and training in education research occurs in the context of the low status of schools of education, relatively speaking, inside and outside of the academic world.

He also indicates that the problems are compounded by education knowledge “being both very soft and very applied.”

The notion of soft from a Kuhnian perspective really refers to whether there is strong consensus around the paradigm of science, or a loose-coupled consensus. David is really using the term “soft” in a very different sense. I think some of the challenge in a number of our fields, including education research, is”softness” around the paradigm. This situation can be an advantage as much as a liability.

David notes as well that the status of education research is affected by researchers coming more out of teaching or low status practice fields, and having a greater proportion of women than other fields.

Some features characteristic of education research can create opportunities as well as challenges. Ellen Lagemann has emphasized the complexities and prospects for building “distinctive research communities” in education research, given the breadth and diversity of its scholarly traditions and patterns of professional solutions.

Its interdisciplinary roots and its openness to self-scrutiny are assets that it has. As a multidisciplinary field, there is expectedly more inherent tension about theoretical and methodological issues, and the requisites for research training and education.

Also, education research may suffer from being cast as applied. It may be more applied in the traditional sense of considerable research being undertaken outside of the laboratory. It may also be more applied because of the strong interest in the research and user communities in producing work that readily links or can be translated into practice. The phenomena, however, being studied and the nature of the knowledge that constitutes this field are as fundamental as in any social or behavioral science. The fact that education research may be held to a higher standard of relevance and use may be a goal that other fields could emulate.

One can see that education research and training are not so exceptional when we examine, comparatively, other fields. Some needs and areas for improving education and training in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences will seem quite familiar, especially to those trained in these disciplines.

Some of the key needs for rethinking education in the SBE sciences —social, behavioral and economic sciences—at the graduate level include:

First, the next generation in these sciences needs advanced skills and methodological tools in order to address the vexing problems facing society, not unlike education research. While specialized knowledge is important, there is growing awareness that social and behavioral scientists need rigorous training in diverse modes of inquiry and methods of analysis, as well as education in how best to use these skills for different purposes.

Second, there is greater appreciation that training requires enhanced, interdisciplinary integration across the SBE sciences, and between these sciences and other fields.

Third, there is general awareness that efforts in education and training have paid insufficient attention to the contexts in which SBE scientists work. Like education researchers, scholars in these disciplines are still largely located within the academy, notwithstanding the growing opportunities in research institutes, laboratories, government, and other public and private sector organizations. Also, even within higher education, more graduates are taking jobs in two and four-year colleges, and non-research intensive universities. Certainly, the parallels there are also clear.

Fourth, there is perceived to be a “gap” in social, behavioral, and economic science education between courses and cohesive curriculum in graduate training. Intentional department-wide planning is perceived to be essential, but rare. The core curriculum, research training, and mentoring merit fresh consideration in light of changing opportunities, changing career goals, and changing motivations of graduate students.

Fifth, the need for some major overarching thinking within and across disciplines needs to be a priority. The content and structure of graduate training and research for the majority of SBS fields remains the purview of individual graduate programs, despite greater or lesser consensus among them resulting from common disciplinary assumptions and needs.

I found something similar in doing some “deep study” of education research programs using admittedly an unusual sampling technique—the U.S. News and World New Report listing of the 20 highest ranked schools of education.

There are really some rich research training programs within each of these schools at the PhD level. Also, there is quite a variation in terms of how they situate, construct, and define what they are aiming to do. Yet, those programs are rather rigorous and rather impressive.

Six, there needs to be more attention and re-thinking in graduate education to the role of a professional masters degree in preparing graduates for research and teaching in different employment sectors, including for high school teaching.

In the social and behavioral sciences, there is recognition of the need to think broadly about the role of a professional master's degree where, indeed, there has been at least some degree of capacity building in schools of education around that issue.

Seventh, perhaps parallel with teachers entering graduate school without sufficient research-related skills, which David pointed to, there is need to close the gap between the technical training and the analytic training required at the graduate level, and the training currently provided in typical undergraduate programs.

Preparation for graduate work requires much more attention to problem formulation and to systematic, rigorous methods across and between qualitative and quantitative modes of inquiry.

Finally, there is a need for more diverse workforce in the social, behavioral and economic sciences. While the SBE sciences are, in general, more diverse than many other fields of science, racial and ethnic minorities in some disciplines and subfields are still proportionately lower in numbers, and in specific types of employment.

Outreach and the identification of non-traditional pathways, targeted investments in training and strategies to support persons who are often first generation in their pursuit of graduate careers, are all necessary to enhance the presence of underrepresented minorities in these fields.

The 1995 National Academy of Sciences report on Reshaping Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers made similar observations regarding all fields of science, although little reference was made explicitly to the social and behavioral sciences.

The report pointed to changing demands for new knowledge, the changing labor market for scientists, the need for versatile scientists with a wide variety of skills, and the continued importance of a diverse talent pool.

While emphasizing the value of the synergistic activity between research and training, the report expressed serious concerns that there is no clear human resource policy for advancing scientists and engineers.

So, education is largely a by-product of research policies and not human resource policies. Indeed, that is part of the challenge that this group is addressing today.

What are some of the impediments, and what are some of the analogues between the impediments in the SBE sciences and schools of education?

As in any area of institutional or organizational change, long-standing practices and perceptions create the greatest impediments to transforming graduate education in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Among the key impediments are the following:

First, there is the challenge of changing the entrenched academic culture and business as usual practices. Faculties operate with implicit understandings of their disciplines or fields, and tend not to question these assumptions, unless concerns are raised from outside the department or new opportunities present themselves. Complacently, limited time, an inflexible reward structure, the view that graduate training is primarily for reproducing new faculty much like themselves, and the rarity of departments undertaking faculty-wide initiatives contribute to maintaining the status quo, absent insight, incentive, or leadership.

Second, department faculties tend to be much more homogeneous in their backgrounds and views than their student bodies. These differences can affect day-to-day communication between faculty and students, and the nature of long-term mentoring relationships.

Third, insufficient financial support for graduate students is a major impediment to effective education. The absence of adequate support affects the quality of student training, the timeliness of completion of their graduate work and, under certain circumstances—for example, intensive family responsibilities—their ability to remain in school.

For example, in 2002, approximately 35 percent of graduate students have research assistantships in the natural and physical sciences compared to only about 15 percent in the SBE sciences. I have tried to ferret out what the comparable percentage would be for doctoral training in education research, but the data are really not disaggregated in that way.

Fourth, limited research funds create an impediment to graduate education and training in SBE fields and disciplines.

There is a long-term pattern of less federal support for research in absolute dollars, and of a net decrease in support for the SBE sciences compared to the natural and physical science and engineering, not just in terms of real dollars, but also in symbolic messages to persons thinking about entering these career lines. A similar issue could be raised with respect to education research.

Fifth, the amount and nature of research and training support can shape how training gets done and how students are exposed to a range of approaches. While the SBE sciences vary within and between fields compared to other sciences, SBE graduate students often work more autonomously and with more limited interaction with their mentors than in fields where students are typically part of large-scale laboratories or research teams.

The kinds of concerns being discussed in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences seem quite relevant to training in education research. While the multiple missions of schools of education may make some of these concerns more formidable and complex than in SBE departments, differences in the challenges and the obstacles are more of degree than of kind.

Examination of doctoral training in education research is heavily focused on how best to build analytic and methodological capacity, train for a full range of employment sectors, and roles and rewards, and prepare a next generation of researchers for building fundamental knowledge and ensuring or facilitating its use. In many respects, graduate schools of education, because of their multiple roles, their multidisciplinary texture, the substantial pathway from practice into graduate training, and the high external concern about their performance, have been more engaged in re-thinking than have many fields.

The work of CORE, this committee, is one such effort. Many fields have nothing of the equivalent assisting in their work.

Many of the disciplines find their national societies taking little or no role in training. In the case of education research, the American Educational Research Association has had a longstanding commitment to enhancing research skills and the professional development of graduate students.

Funded since 1990 by the National Science Foundation, with contributions from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Institute of Education Sciences, the AERA Grants Program supports advanced graduate students using large-scale education databases in their dissertation work. With funding since 1994 from the Spencer Foundation, AERA has also had a Pre-dissertation Fellowship Program that provides a one-year fellowship to students early in their careers.

Both of these are substantive programs, not pass-throughs of funds. Both programs draw from a range of disciplines, with awardees having a primary research interest in education, and receiving intentional training, mentoring, and guidance as part of their program of support.

A final example often cited in the work we are doing for NSF is the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and I suspect we will hear a little bit more about that this afternoon. This effort aims at supporting multi-year projects to encourage re-examination of the preparation of doctoral students.

Happily, education, and specifically educational psychology, and curriculum and instruction are included as departments in this program. Other fields include chemistry, English, history, mathematics and neuroscience, with the goal of producing findings that can be disseminated and applied.

Many in other social and behavioral sciences saw the CID model as a framework that could and should be used elsewhere.

Let me turn briefly to doctoral research training in schools of education. Because schools of education are units with missions and purposes beyond the training of doctoral researchers, they have much in common with professional schools.

To some extent, graduate schools of education may be the closest fit to schools of social work, because a large proportion of those pursuing education typically have practice experience and seek advanced training in research.

Law schools are not, in the main, invested in doctoral training. While law academics see themselves as engaged in the production of scholarship, and growing numbers of new law faculty have additional advanced degree training, there is not the same sense that additional theory, analytic skill, or methodological training at the doctoral level in law is essential for research production.

Social work is much more akin to education in aspiring to building conceptual and methodological scientific skill.

Social work research is younger as a field with a formal identity than education research. While AERA was, for example, founded in 1916, the Institute for Social Work Research was founded in 1993. While, of course, research is not new to social workers on faculties, much more reflection is now underway on doctoral training for doing such work.

Key concerns will have a familiar ring. Among the many shared with me by Joan Slotnick, Executive Director of the Institute for Social Work Research, include:

First, there is ongoing tension in doctoral programs between the objective of preparing high quality researchers to go to top schools, and the objective of training faculty with broad knowledge and excellent teaching skills, who can work in social work programs ranging from very large to very small.

This challenge is faced in education research and in every field preparing researchers who will be located in diverse academic settings and, indeed, it was one of the challenges that I pointed to with respect to SBE education.

Second, while some doctoral programs focus on clinical practice, more focus on research, and some are trying to make the transition to a research focus or create a balance between the two.

Third, with the changes in the academy, there is pressure for MSW-level faculty to get PhDs and do research and publish.

Thus, several doctoral programs have created distance programs and summer intensive programs, or compressed executive level programs for obtaining doctoral degrees. In some schools of education, there are some parallels.

Fourth, as in education, some doctoral programs are specifically interdisciplinary. Graduate students concentrate on social work and sociology, social work and psychology, social work and child development and the like.

Fifth, doctoral programs, especially in large universities, are working to obtain funding for all of their students, through various graduate assistantships, recognizing that the kind of funding gives schools a competitive edge in attracting the best and most able of doctoral students.

Sixth, as in education research, doctoral students in social work are older. The average PhD student in social work is a woman in her 40s making a mid-career change.

Having addressed some of the challenges and parallel issues that occupy those reexamining graduate education in all of science and, in particular, the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, and having looked at some of the issues that occupy the attention of those engaged in doctoral training in professional schools, I want to return briefly to my fourth goal, that is, what does doctoral training in education research currently look like, and are schools of education an appropriate home.

The answer to the second question is a definite yes. Pragmatically, graduate schools of education are providing doctoral training in research in much more significant numbers than is any other disciplinary field.

Less pragmatically, locating this responsibility in schools of education makes sense intellectually.

First, it is the only academic unit solely dedicated to the mission of advancing knowledge about education and education-related processes.

Second, the link to practice can work to the advantage of this field of research.

Third, education schools are well situated, by virtue of their composition, to address the challenges of interdisciplinary integration in research and training. While the task is not easy, there have been some interesting and successful efforts in that regard.

Fourth, and equally as important, while doctoral training and education research may fall short of our aspirations, the fact that it falls short elsewhere with even less reflection may permit education to lead, if not “rise with all of boats” engaged in this kind of reflection and consideration.

Graduate schools of education have the capacity to be very important sites for strong doctoral training programs.

David estimates that approximately 100 of the 750 graduate schools of education offering graduate degrees devote substantial resources to education research and to doctoral programs.

The nature of the programs in these institutions is quite diverse in areas of emphasis, approach, collaboration with other disciplinary departments, and requirements to degree. As I said, there is great variation in them.

Some schools of education are so large that PhD conferring programs exist in some departments, but not in others. The vast majority of doctorates in educational psychology are essentially in educational psychology programs, departments, or specialties within schools of education.

In sampling 12 of 27 programs on a list provided to me by the American Psychological Association as educational psychology programs in psychology, I found that 11 of 12 were homed in colleges or schools of education.

While no other disciplinary subfield is so similarly embedded in education as is educational psychology, the capacity of graduate schools of education to be places of such training could be a model for other disciplinary and interdisciplinary arenas of work.

Available data show the challenges as well as the potential for training in education research. Examining only doctoral degrees, it is difficult to identify the number that are in education research, because research and administration are fused, and are not distinguished in reporting. Indeed, even research and administration were not reported separately until 1987, I think.

As can be seen in table one, however, even if more than half of those earning doctorates in research or administration are not pursuing research degrees, the true number of doctoral research degrees is likely greater than the number of economics PhDs, but less than the number of non-clinical psychology PhDs. Let me say that psychology has a somewhat analogous challenge to education research as a heavily practice-oriented, as well as science-oriented field.

Table two represents my effort to look at subfields and try to group those that seem centrally oriented toward doctoral research. I have listed all of the other subfields as well. That is not to say that they do not have research components. Undoubtedly, some that I have listed have more research components than others. For heuristic purposes, though, let us assume that this classification works.

Table two seeks to estimate, by listed specialty, those that are likely doctorates in education research. The data here suggest that approximately 1,000 doctorates are produced in education research each year.

This is a large number by social and behavioral science standards, close to about where economics is, and double the amount of all sociology and political science, and certainly well out ahead of PhD production in a field like statistics.

Thus, this situation presents a challenge and an opportunity to graduate schools of education to think through getting it right.

In these framing remarks, I have sought to address the challenges and the opportunities in doctoral training and education research in the context of challenges being faced by all fields of research seeking to rethink and reshape graduate education.

The fact that graduate schools of education have commenced this process, at least at national levels, is an important first step.

The investment in training by the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, NCES, IES and, more recently, the Carnegie Foundation, are important in building the capacity to undertake high quality education research.

Resources for research and training are essential to attracting and training a critical mass of talented researchers, and in signaling to them the significance of work in this field.

Every field of science notes the importance of training and research resources, and education research is neither over-resourced nor over-valued as a field.

Outreach and recruitment are also important. According to David, teaching experience is now the major trajectory into the pipeline in graduate schools of education.

Outreach to pursue doctoral training in education research should, however, seek students in fields from statistics and sociology to linguistics and anthropology, with interdisciplinary training models that will meet their needs.

To that end, outreach needs to be targeted earlier in the pipeline; that is, at the undergraduate level. Research-based experienced for undergraduate education majors and designed research experiences for undergraduates, led by schools of education but directed to undergraduates across the social and behavioral sciences, including education, could go a long way toward diversifying the backgrounds of the now prototypical doctoral candidate in education research in schools of education.

Finally, graduate schools of education can seize the opportunity to be centers of learning about education and education research.

In growing and improving doctoral training in education research, graduate programs would be wise to examine the current offerings or models and whether, consonant with “letting a thousand flowers bloom,” there might be an analytic and methodological core that could be advanced.

I held myself back from talking about core and canon, not trying to use buzzwords that would be off putting. Nonetheless, I do think that we can specify some of the overarching strands or component of what should be included in excellent research training programs, just as the SBE sciences face a similar challenge. In doing so, a cooperative and collaborative stance to social, behavioral, and economic science departments can only help to engender insights and wide support.

With those more “half-full” thoughts on the table, I look forward to the discussion in this session, and throughout the day.

[Applause.]