MR. WISE: I would like to thank both the speakers for providing both an institutional and a comparative sort of context for the discussion we have today, and I would like to start by opening it up to the committee first for questions and comments. Again, please, this is being recorded. Say your name and speak into the mike.

MS. SCHNEIDER: Thanks very much for the really intriguing talks. My first question is to David. It seemed to me that most of your remarks were dealing with the field of teacher education within schools of education.

One of the things that we all recognize is that, in most schools of education, there is a diversification of particular specializations.

I was wondering to what degree you felt that the remarks that you made apply to other fields like counseling, psych, administration, methodology, some of the other kinds of strands that are within schools of education, if you would see them as the same, and would that critique hold.

MR. LABAREE: The same in what regard, were you talking about in particular?

MS. SCHNEIDER: That they come primarily from teaching, that they share these certain kinds of normative judgements about research, that the kinds of analytic skills they have are somewhat different.

I think there was a whole set of different assumptions that were made about the students that were in schools of education.

It seemed to me that, at least from my understanding, and maybe I misunderstood, that it was primarily directed at those people that were looking at teacher education.

MR. LABAREE: I think you are right. The fields, I was talking in the second half, about the points about transition from teacher to researcher.

That was applying to those programs that have a high proportion of teachers in them, and teacher ed CNI programs are the ones that have the highest concentration, but the others all have them, not quite in that degree.

So, in that sense, yes, those remarks apply to the practitioner, to researcher transition, but the earlier part are generic.

The status issue and the sort of knowledge base issue are things that all of them deal with, and the number of practitioners that go into the field in all of those realms is not small and it is not a number we want to see declining. This is a healthy process.

MS. LEVINE: I wanted to speak about what I thought, at least from reading a number of pieces that David wrote.

It seemed also here that his primary contrast was to look at the fact that those going into the doctoral training for educational research in schools of education primarily come from a teaching background, and the two cultures problem of how those meet.

In other -- even though the general features are true of persons in different programs within graduate schools of education, I thought you were pointing to the particular gap when other preparation leading to a doctorate or EDD degree may be a better or more close fit with practice.

In this case, he was directly speaking about those with teaching backgrounds seeking to pursue research careers, and some of that culture clash.

MS. SCHNEIDER: Do we have numbers on that? Are there any numbers? Does anybody here know anything about numbers?

MS. LEVINE: I will say that I went crazy looking for numbers. There really are no numbers that I could find in any of the federal statistical data collections on the backgrounds.

I will say it is a common rule of thumb, as Paul Neal would have said, sort of a fireside induction about what exists. While I wanted to challenge it, I kind of accepted it as probably more true than not.

MS. SCHNEIDER: I think this is one that we have to be kind of careful about. If I think about, unfortunately, the defunct department of education at the University of Chicago, that would not have been the case.

In fact, it would have been only a small proportion, certainly within the 1990s, that came out of the teaching profession.

Maybe that explains why the problems that Chicago had happened. Nonetheless, I think that to make this -- then, of course, if you are dealing with the capacity issues, it would be great to have some numbers on that. I had a question for Felice, but should I wait? Okay.

MS. LEVINE: May I say one thing? In my remarks, I took it as a question. I didn't know and my remarks weren't assuming that they were primarily from teaching in those doctoral programs.

Actually, I think probably some number of schools could probably provide that data on where their doctoral candidates in their research training programs are coming from. That would be worth knowing.

MS. SCHNEIDER: The question that I wanted to ask you, Felice, and I know that you have thought about this a lot, if you had to characterize, for example, training in human development or social psychology in terms of doctoral research training, how would you contrast that with training in a school of ed.

I started to jot down a few things. One would be cohort size, two would be proportion of students that are funded, core of knowledge base that has to be acquired with respect to different markers along the way.

I was wondering if there were some other kinds of characteristics that you might, given your background, that you might see as different between doctoral training in education and doctoral training in the social and behavioral sciences.

MS. LEVINE: I think those are some. Indeed, when I looked at those large numbers, one of the first things that struck me, even if we scale down the numbers based on some assumption of estimate measurement error there, it looks like there are large numbers of students pursuing doctoral training, and a difference in creating cohort effects and being able to provide the adequacy of support.

I will have to say that, as a more recent entry into being a student of graduate programs in schools of education, I know less about their internal dynamics than I know about the dynamics of social and behavioral and economic science departments.

I will say that I am struck, in the behavioral and social sciences, how wide that variation is, how wide support is, how wide the coherence of programs are, how wide and disparate requirements are.

I think that that is one of the challenges that I was trying to outline or bracket what is going on in the behavioral and social sciences, to do some scrutiny in that regard.

So, while training in educational research may be at, let's say, among the softer ends in the paradigm sense of the work, in that continua, I don't think it is any different, and that is why I raised the limitations of the exceptionalist doctrine.

I don't think it is in a different field. I think it is in the same field, and that it would be of benefit, and with some very interesting challenges and opportunities, and one is that interdisciplinary mix.

When I have looked at some of the programs, frankly, I am quite impressed, without naming what those are.

Many in educational psych, many that fuse child development and human development are as rigorous as any I have seen in free-standing child development departments, in the articulation of classes, the sequencing of methods training.

Now, I haven't done site visits to see if there is a there, there, but I think there is enough pattern of similarity that we could capitalize that to the benefit of education research.

MS. LAGEMANN: Two quick comments. First of all, on the data issue, do we know where students come from that get doctorates, David may know a lot more about this than I do, but I tried to find out this summer how many schools of education there were, and I struck out, as did three librarians at Harvard. So, I mean, the data describing schools of education are horrible. They are just non-existent.

The first question I was going to ask, Felice just basically answered and that is, I was interested that both of you are willing to make generalizations about graduate training in research in education.

I would say the only generalization we can really make with any validity is to say that the variation is so great between institutions, among the fields, within the same institution and across students, that we really can't generalize. I mean, I think it is the extreme variation is a problem that we need to address.

The question I have that you haven't answered is whether or not economics are much more central to all of these problems than either of you made out.

David said -- and I agree with him entirely -- that people who are going into education research in schools of education need more time. Well, time equals money, and the money isn't there.

Felice commented on the number of students there are. That is because schools of education usually are cash cows for the schools of arts and sciences. Would you say a word about how central you think economics is to all of this?

MR. LABAREE: I don't know. I mean, I think there is a huge variation. I have been fortunate enough to be at an institution before where funding for doctoral students in education was never a problem.

It is the case when you have large teacher preparation programs that support a lot of people and a lot of research grants that support a lot of people.

That, I understand, varies widely and the problem with the part-time doctoral student in education in a huge one, in the sense that people need to support themselves by full time teaching or some other work, and doing doctoral work on the side, which is a much more difficult way to do it, and particularly a relatively weak way to socialize someone into a culture of research.

I think economics is an issue there, that is a real problem. In the absence of widespread federal and other kind of support to make that kind of thing less dependent on local factors is important.

Can I just say one thing about economics, which is where I thought you were going with that comment initially, and that is the discipline of economics.

I think one of the interesting phenomena, if you look at it today, is that economics is taking over educational research.

I mean, it is an interesting problem in status politics, when you have a high status discipline and a low status area, it is easy for the evil empire to invade and take over.

Education is an interesting arena in that, as an institutional area, everybody wants a part of it. Because of the status issue, we are kind of open to invasion. There is a kind of sense that people have that, well, any idiot could do that kind of stuff, we are smarter than they are, so let's do it.

I mean, that is an interesting problem. I was at a conference on educational research last spring where over half the people there were economists, who were quite confident about all the answers, just drop that paradigm over our problems and the answers pop out at the other end.

A lot of fields don't have that kind of problem because their reputation, in some ways, acts as an umbrella that keeps that sort of acid rain away from them.

MS. LEVINE: Just briefly on the economics, I think one of the reasons why I tried to point to that in my comparative discussion of investments in social and behavioral science and economics training, is the disparity between those fields of science and the physical and the biological -- especially the physical and chemical and engineering sciences.

I would put education researchers somewhere in that mix, at the bottom of the mix, even though we cannot, with the same kind of precision as those data are available for fields of science, education is not considered yet in that clump and lump.

So, there is much less systematic data on the amount of dollars invested in student support, but we can see that, let's say, in comparison to areas of health, even in behavioral areas of health, there are many more training grant proposals at the predoctoral and post-doctoral level, even at the undergraduate level than anything like exist in education.

So, it is not all about money, but money matters, in also creating the kind of space, the kind of research opportunities that will permit students and faculty to engage in adequate training and adequate research.

MS. FOLKENBERG: My question will press a little further on data and look a little further afield. I would like to know a couple of things, if you have any either data or ideas about this.

Number one, do we have a shortage of educational researchers? If so, in what areas?

Number two, I would like to know a little bit more, if you have any information, on the perception of the recent graduates, maybe one year out, two years out. What do they think about the quality of the education they received and the doctoral programs that they participated in.

Number three, do they stay in the field of educational research, or do they bleed off into something else?

MS. LEVINE: The experience of those who graduated doctoral programs and how they perceive the strengths and weaknesses of those programs are little known in every field of research, including in educational research. Karen, your first question was?

MS. FALKENBERG: Do we have a shortage of educational researchers?

MS. LEVINE: Those are always interesting supply and demand kinds of questions raised across fields. There have been various points at which NRC kinds of committees have looked at capacity and the sufficiency of capacity in all fields of science.

Education was not part of that picture and, really, neither was social and behavioral science much of that picture, which led some members of one panel to write a very effective minority report in the area of health that raised the issue, well, potentially there is sufficient capacity in some health related science fields, with respect to the adequacy of scientists in those areas.

We have hardly scratched the surface, was the essence of this minority report, on even identifying the issues that need to be examined with respect to the impact and interaction of behavior on health.

While there may be capacity for that which is currently done, the problems have not been adequately specified, given that interaction between the sense that intellectual work can be supported and people can go into this field.

What better institution of such enormous size and scope, other than the family, it is the primary institution that every member of our society -- I am preaching to the converted here -- intersect with.

Educational processes, informal and formal, learning, cognition, the development of persons through the life cycle are really the challenges that educational researchers can confront.

When I say that, I include every discipline and their perspective, including those trained within schools of education.

I see schools of education as being the central node for that training because they can, when properly constructed to provide training in educational research, they can work on those issues, both with respect to training as well as the synergism between different modes of inquiry and different frames of reference.

The data are not there, but I am not even sure it is such an easily measurable problem without further articulating also what the nature of the inquiry is, both in terms of fundamental work as well as applications and interventions -- and this is a field that values all three -- need to look like.

MR. LABAREE: Can I just speak to the issue of quantity? When you look at Felice's numbers there, a thousand educational research PhDs every year, it is hard to say there is a shortage.

The shortage is a quality shortage, not a quantity shortage. Think how many of those 1,000 dissertations would you really like to read. Think about that.

I think part of the problem here, I mean, that is not an uncommon problem. How many dissertations in other fields are page turners?

In education, I think there is a problem, and that is that they are not only not page turners, but they read often like pilot studies, which are what they are.

We are dealing with a compressed education program within the doctoral program without having, say, a prior experience writing a master's thesis, and without having a prior research experience to build toward a dissertation that has, therefore, potentially more contribution built into it.

The dissertation, certainly for a lot of the students I dealt with, was the first piece of research they ever did, and it reads like that.

That is a problem. That means that people at the point of graduation, I think, are not at all ready to jump into the education research community and make a major contribution.

I think it puts a real strain on our graduates when they jump immediately into a tenure stream job, where they are under the gun to actually start producing. I think that is asking a bit much.

MS. LEVINE: Let me say also how important these data are. It may be that this afternoon, when Russ Whitehurst speaks, he may make -- because he has spoken to the issue of what he views to be the lower number of educational psychologists one year out, based on surveys that the American Psychological Association has done, remaining in research.

The numbers produced from psychology in ed psych are quite small. We actually don't know where they are trained -- meaning, we don't know because it hasn't yet been reported, I am sure it is known within the context of those surveys.

Given the very substantial and larger number of, for example, educational psychologists trained in educational psych programs within schools and departments of education, some follow up study, comparative study, of what those persons are doing in what are long standing and quite rigorous programs of training, in many respects, what they are doing.

The nature of following up on the doctoral students from these and many other programs is really an important agenda of work.

MR. KLAHR: I am a little puzzled about why -- David started and Felice ended with discussions of really career paths, the kind of students that come into these programs, the reasons for being in the program, and we are just talking about where they go after the program.

So, I am puzzled by why a field that is so concerned with enhancing its reputation and its quality and its rigor continues to look for its main resource from the least prepared people.

We know that undergraduates in education are often some of the weakest students. You are then taking people who have a set of practical skills, who have been teachers, and then you are trying go turn them into researchers.

Their motivation for becoming PhD students may have nothing to do with research. It may be for career advancement and so that they can become superintendents and so on.

Many of them may intend to do no research. It is not a matter that they can't do it. They never wanted to do it in the first place. They wanted to pick up a credential.

A lot of business schools will admit undergraduate business majors to their master's programs, but they don't look to them for their PhD programs, because they know they really have a different set of skills and a different interest and a different career path.

I am really puzzled about why the schools of education continue to look for the very kind of people that David described as tremendously ill suited for advancing the science of education. That is one of the goals of this committee, is to address that issue.

MR. WISE: Could you summarize the question?

MR. KLAHR: Why do you admit people like this to schools of education, if they are so terrible and they are not going to change?

MR. LABAREE: That is not the point I was intending to make. Part of the issue is, again, we want to separate out the fact that the huge majority of doctorates in education are professional doctorates and not educational research doctorates.

We are looking at a relatively small subset that is people focusing on a career in research and not planning to become a school superintendent.

Within that community I think the quality, if you look at GRE scores and grade point averages, the usual kind of thing, it is at least equivalent to those in doctorates in the social sciences.

I don't see that that is -- you know, in terms of skills, that is a problem. The issue I was talking about was not the skill problem but the educational foundation upon which they were building a doctoral career, which is a socialization issue that we can actually try to deal with. That, I think, is -- I don't see that as being a terrible problem.

I also think that, in a professional field, it is not a healthy thing to create educational research as a sort of Mandarin science that is cut off from the profession.

I think we need to have a hefty proportion of people going into this who bring that teacher perspective to it, to keep it grounded and to remind ourselves that we are doing this in the context of a professional school which is, I think, appropriate.

That makes it a much more complicated task, but I can't see that recruiting non-teachers is the answer.

MS. LEVINE: I think both of us, if we were potentially misconstrued, David, I think our emphasis was on the doctoral training programs within schools of education that are training in educational research.

In that sense there are, what, 7,000 PhDs produced in education. My estimate of 1,000, whether it is about right or not right -- and I agree it is a full range -- is really only a small fraction and those, I do think, probably compare credential-wise rather comparably to those who enter graduate programs across the arts and sciences.

Both of us -- of course, my social psychological background, and David's sociological -- lead us to focus on those coming and passing through as if this process were input and output.

Really, we see the center of gravity, I think for both of us, thinking through how to re-envision and re-invent and grow and develop strong educational research programs within schools of education, building upon the best models and inventing some new ones.

MR. FLETCHER: I really just have a comment, which is, in all the numbers and discussion that the two of you provided, not once did you mention special education programs.

I think it is fair to say that special education programs have consistently produced a very solid group of young researchers who have stayed in the field, have done research, that OSEP has a pretty strong research program, including provisions for training and so on. I think it is important to emphasize that, when you talk about the development of educational researchers.

MS. EISENHART: I am struck by the fact that Ellen and others have repeatedly said that there is very little public appetite for educational research.

It seems to me that one of the things that we ought to be working on in doctoral programs devoted to educational research is somehow generating more public appetite for educational research.

Felice, you mentioned social work as an example of a field that is dealing with some of the same issues, some of the close issues that educational research is dealing with.

I am just wondering, would social work be a model or some other field that you know of be a model for thinking about how we could generate more public appetite for educational research as part of what we are doing in doctoral training.

MS. LEVINE: Quite a challenge. Let me say that I think that the public engagement and interest in science generally, perhaps with the exclusion of health related sciences that intersect with social and behavioral science, is somewhat low. The mental map of science in our public tends not to include the study of social and behavioral phenomena.

For me, the challenge for educational research is rather similar to that which other fields face. I think the one that has the largest public recognition as important is health, because it affects everyone when they wake up every day.

I actually think that, because education has that kind of salience, probably more than social work, in a way, and that face interest and drive for excellent, that we are at a point where we could build upon a sense of the significance of having sound research flow from sound science.

We also know, though, that education -- and I didn't realize it as much before in my prior life than in my current life -- I recognize that nothing could be of more significance than bringing great science to bear on educational issues, because of its centrality to our society.

It is a hot topic and a highly politicized one. Often in areas that are highly politicized, sciences may become footnote, but not necessarily influence the process of thought in the public and the policy makers as much as it should.

That is a joint challenge that I think we all face, but I don't think it is because of the under the radar screen of this topic.

I think we have got the right topic and should figure out some pathways to up public recognition of the importance of, as Don Campbell would say, engaging in making relevant science for the policy making process.

MR. LABAREE: One thing I would like to add to that is a potential problem that comes with ramping up the scientific character of research and the methodological sophistication of it.

You run into a certain declining return problem that David Cohen has written about before, in the relationship between social science research and public policy.

That is, as the research gets more sophisticated, it becomes more technical, becomes less accessible to the policy people, and it also becomes more complex to try to summarize.

In some ways the most impactful research is also the most superficial, because it comes out with a bing bang clearly definable answer.

It is the further research at a more sophisticated level that complicates the issue and seems less usable, in some ways, for the policy makers.

So, there is a rhetorical problem there about how to find ways of finding an audience for research that is out there.

I think one of the things we need to be doing in our doctoral programs is not simply teaching people technique, but also talking about the rhetoric of presentation.

How do you put your case across to different audiences. How do you make that argument, and dealing with this potentially a multiple levels, once at the monographic level with a great deal of technical skill and complexity, and another at the Ed Week commentary level, where you are capturing some major issues and trying to interject those into the policy debate.

MR. JUNKER: I was struck by the comments that Felice made about exceptionalist thinking, and also by the remarks that David has made about the importance of interdisciplinary work that cuts both within and across the disciplines.

So, I want to push on those ideas just a little bit in the following way, because I am also struck by the fact that we are still talking about schools of education. So, implicitly, there is kind of an exceptionalist thinking in the discussion.

So, I am wondering if you could each comment on perhaps the aspects of the mission of a school of education that either requires or justifies a separate school and also, perhaps, some aspects of the mission that is taken on by the schools of education which might be done more efficiently or productively if the wall weren't there, or if it were a much more permeable wall.

To give you some idea what I am looking for, I will give you an answer that I don't actually advocate, because I haven't thought about it enough.

One possible answer is that there is a kind of professional training mission in the same way that there is a professional training mission in business or schools of public health or something, that requires a separate institution, but a different research mission, for example, might be done if the wall were non-existent or highly permeable.

MR. LABAREE: I don't know. I don't know what to say about that. I think I am in the same position that you are, which is I could go a lot of different ways on that.

It is hard for me to feel comfortable seeing educational research divorced from the professional mission of a school of education.

I think it becomes a different kind of research when it is done in a disciplinary context, for purposes that are not arising the way they tend to in our research, from the stuff that is happening out in the field, that is challenging the teachers and the administrators that we graduate, that we feel we need to deal with. That seems an irreducible minimum rationale for why education research in ed schools needs to be there.

MS. LEVINE: Let me say, from a comparative perspective, it would almost seem that, if it weren't there or the schools didn't exist in the way it is structured, it would be invented.

I can say, for example, that psych ed programs, which are clinical programs in psychology, some of which are in universities and some of which are free standing, have built the research training, although the emphasis is on clinical, many of those programs have built the research training into the clinical training because of the recognition that a good clinician at the doctoral level also needs to be a sound thinker, consumer, if not producer, of scholarship.

The fact that we have bits, pieces and some even towers of excellence -- although I agree with Ellen, and I think she was saying she heard me say something similar -- that there is great range and variety of how that works itself out in many models and formats within graduate programs, it would seem that, if it were not there, we would think that that fusing would be important.

MR. JUNKER: Let me just pursue a little bit the second half of my question, which is where it would be really productive to tunnel through the sort of institutional separation.

Where would be productive to have more of the collaboration between researchers within schools of education and researchers in disciplinary departments that you were talking about before?

MR. LABAREE: I don't know.

MS. LEVINE: One of the things that has interested me is, for example, the Spencer Foundation initiative where I think five awards were made directly to make that fusion and to work on the nature of that fusion.

Actually, as someone who really came from without the framework of schools of education, I am struck with how much interdisciplinary they are within and also the fact that, even though we say there is not much interaction and communication, how many models of very formal interaction there are.

So, I think this very intentional activity that is being undertaken with diffusion of five disciplines and, I think, graduate schools of education will give us some interesting models. I think the CID will give us some others.

I, in my closing remarks, said that I think that as we build and rethink what schools of education are doing, we also do not want to cut off, just as we want to have that synergism with practice, we also want to have that synergism and integration of the core disciplines that do produce and provide some analytic perspectives, and we can to those fields as well.

The stove pipe notion of higher education, I think we all recognize, has long since outlived its usefulness, and that kind of synergism across every field is certainly giving much more attention in the world of higher education more generally.

MR. WISE: I would like to leave time for a couple of questions or comments from the audience. If you could either come to the mike or, if that is not really convenient, we will try to get the mike to come to you.

Given that there appear to be quite a few people, if I could ask you to be fairly brief, and also in the responses, if we could be as brief as we can.

MR. HANCOCK: I would like to follow up on Margaret's question about creating an appetite, if you will, in the public for educational research.

Felice's response, at least a part of it, was that if we realize the potential of educational research to deal with some problems that we are facing in society in American schools, to focus is.

I immediately thought, Felice, about the notion that there are the achieving students in our schools and the non-achieving students in our schools.

Unfortunately, poor students seem to be the ones who are not achieving, according to standardized tests, anyhow, and I am worried about, if educational researchers don't take on some of these kinds of issues -- and I guess I am talking about mega studies as opposed to an individual PhD's student's study or even an individual faculty member's line of research.

I am wondering again, just to pursue that a little bit longer, if you all have some thoughts about the challenges we would face if we tried to have educational research take on some of the issues and causes and problems that need to be researched to according to -- I am going to focus it on American education, even though I know there are world wide issues as well. Do you all have any thoughts about that, or am I off the deep end on that?

MS. LEVINE: Briefly, that is why I said it was a little bit of a matched piece, that on a number of issues, and on that very issue you are addressing, there has been -- including produced by, as I look around the room -- important scholars in this room on those very issues.

So, I think one of the reasons why the National Science Foundation, which is perhaps my shortest answer, is focusing now on human capacity building of the talent pool of trained researchers in social, behavioral and economic sciences, including education research, is that there is a much more fulsome recognition that we need better trained researchers.

We need probably -- I am going to say -- more of them, whatever that means, of that genre who can tackle -- we are hardly a drop in the bucket of being able to have, despite the fact that we have many important large scale comparative experimental longitudinal inquiries done by many investigators, the number of adolescent health surveys and the number of major projects of that sort and major data bases are really kind of a drop in what we need to confront these issues.

MR. LABAREE: The example you gave is a great one. It is a case of a very difficult issue which a single researcher would run away from, but we can't, because it is in our field.

Again, we are kind of forced to deal with the stuff that needs to be dealt with, not the stuff that we are good at.

I think that is one of the reasons why it is important to keep a major educational research presence in ed schools, where that kind of responsibility can't be ignored.

MR. HANCOCK: I guess I just want to respond that I am sure that we can't solve the problem i a single day national dialogue like this, but I am hoping that AERA, for example, and some of the sections within AERA and certainly any role that CORE can take to help us not only to talk about theoretical constructs and research methodologies, but to talk about my bias, of course, would be for the application of those constructs and those methodologies to solve problems.

Margaret, I think that is the way we get the public to buy in, you know, to know that we are doing some research that, according to them, matters.

Again, Felice, your example of health is just another one of those examples. I mean, all the information that we now know about women and breast cancer is because there was serious research on that, and because that is things that the public cares about.

We have got to make education, I guess, appealing in that sense, or the results of our educational research appealing in that sense.

MR. WISE: We are into stoppage time. So, I know there is a tension of wanting to get to break. I would like to give each of the four of you remaining a chance to ask your question briefly and, if it is appropriate, have a brief response.

MS. HARBIN: I am Gloria Harbin and I am from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the school of education, as well as the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, which is a research institute there.

One of the questions that I have for you, you mentioned the real importance of culture in training educational researchers and quality researchers.

I was thinking about two things that you didn't mention as challenges with relationship to that. One is that there is certainly a need, in order to answer the kinds of diverse questions that we have, to be knowledgeable about multiple methods. How do you get students trained in those multiple methods?

Then, a second challenge is the challenge that many of the people who do research are part-time researchers in schools of ed.

So, it becomes very difficult for them to enculturate people into the culture of really good, scientific and rigorous research when, frankly, for many of them, the only reason that they are conducting research is in order to get tenure.

Maybe I am stepping on toes and saying something out of school that I shouldn't be saying, but I will just say it anyway.

So, I wondered if -- I know that, at the University of North Carolina, one of the ways we have dealt with that is that students get a lot of their interdisciplinary -- and it goes back to what you are saying is that that is the way they get interdisciplinary research and get really enculturated into research, and our long-term evaluations indicate that.

I wondered what you sort of thought about those issues, and other solutions besides having an interdisciplinary research organization.

MR. WISE: Let me say first that we will be getting into some of these topics in greater depth in the sections to follow.

I do believe the issue of part time, and students whose real goal is not research has been at least briefly addressed. I don't know whether you want to add anything to that.

MS. LEVINE: I just want to say, on the issue of multiple methods, while high levels of proficiency in multiple methods homed in the same person may be an aspiration and not a fully attainable goal, comprehension and appreciation of the tools and strategies is an achievable goal.

I thought the article in Educational Researcher by I think Reba Paige has a very interesting strategy to introduce students and train them in multiple methods at, I think, Irvine, was one example of the kind of program that could be incorporated into the curricula.

There are many others that happen either in the context of the research training that goes on, or in the context of course development.

MS. BLOOM: Peggy Fong Bloom from Loyola University, Chicago. We are one of those ones with the trench type turning out doctoral students.

I think the comparison between education and other disciplines doctoral training is important, but I didn't hear either of you address the issue that, in many disciplines, the person who gets their doctorate is not viewed as the finished product.

Many disciplines then have post-doctoral kinds of arrangements. I am particularly struck that I have faculty trained in very good programs, but when they arrive, they are suddenly the expert, and they are no more the expert than -- they struggle with that.

Often, they know more about research methods than almost anybody else in the school. I am wondering if we don't need to look at other ways of continuing research training.

MR. LABAREE: Let me just make a quick comment on that. Number one, it is a funding issue, again. You need funding for a large system of post doc programs to handle that kind of issue. So, that is a major concern.

MS. LEVINE: In the NSF report that I am preparing we do address post doc and early career. Actually, there are in the landscape far fewer in the social, behavioral and economic sciences than in other fields.

There are some examples that actually are in education research that are of profound value for both how to structure post-doctoral training and make it a meaningful developmental experience as opposed to some of the complex issues that are inherent in certain post-doctoral initiatives.

If I can plug, the National Research Council published a very good volume on post-doctoral training that is very instructive about both how to do that effectively for individual post-doc experiences, as well as for post-doc training programs.

MR. LABAREE: One last thing, too. In a field like ours, where people arrive often in mid-career, it may be unrealistic to keep extending the training they get before they get their first real job. I mean, I don't think people want to keep putting off their life that long, and that is a problem we face.

MR. DI SESSA: I am Andy DiSessa from UC Berkeley, and this may be hopeless, because I want to raise a difficult problem briefly.

That is, in our whole discussion of this, I think we tend to homogenize education research and the problem of education at every instant that we can possibly do it. I think that is possibly a very dangerous mind set that we need to break.

The example that I want to give is the path that David Labaree talked about, which is talking about, from teaching to educational research.

That has nothing to do with my experience as a trainer of educational researchers at UC Berkeley. I have had zero students who were undergraduate majors in education. I have had zero students who were even undergraduate majors in psychology.

My modal students are a masters in physics or biology, and that is a very different niche. It has very different concerns.

It is a niche that maybe needs to be grown. Maybe it is a niche that needs to be shrunk, but that is the level, I think, at which we can really engage these problems.

Identifying those niches is difficult, but I don't think we are going to get anywhere if we try to solve all problems at once.

MR. FORTENBURY: Very briefly, a follow up that actually links with the previous comment and the questions that were raised earlier.

I am Norman Fortenbury(?), director of the Center for Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education at the National Academy of Engineering.

While w have to reach out to those in other science and engineering disciplines, as the previous speaker indicated, it would seem to offer several opportunities, at least as a niche market, particularly with respect to research issues in higher education.

Several times comments have been made about funding, and these are disciplines that have more funding and are trying to get into education research and, because they are trying to get into it, it would be helpful to have your guidance and expertise so that it was done well. There are numerous examples of it being done otherwise.

Third, this represents a growth area. It is sort of new territory that all people can sort of expand into. Thank you.

MR. WISE: We are past our stoppage time and into the break. So, we are about to take what I think will be an eight-and-a-half minute break.

I would invite anybody in the back, who is having a little trouble hearing or seeing, there are several seats up in the first several rows. Please join me in thanking the speakers.

[Applause.]