BCSSE Projects: Strategic Education Research Partnership

The mission of the Strategic Education Research Partnership is to promote a research enterprise that has the capacity to offer teachers, school administrators, and policy officials a well-organized and powerful knowledge base that supports their efforts to improve K-12 education.

New forms of governance, management, and funding are needed to significantly enhance capacity and to give education research traction. The purpose of this project is to find new and more effective ways to organize education R&D. Its point of departure is the ambitious 15-year R&D program called for in Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Utilization (1999). The central task is to design an institutional infrastructure that can focus education research on a few important problems and effectively support and manage large-scale, long-term work addressing those problems. Prominent among the design considerations are strategic focus, continuity, quality, scale, the accumulation of research findings, and the development of closer collaboration among researchers and practitioners. To complement the design task, a research agenda will be developed in two illustrative problem areas: learning and instruction, and student motivation. The project will also do the preliminary outreach and coalition-building needed to launch a Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP).

The National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council has long been convinced that strengthening public education for all students calls for teachers to have a more substantial knowledge base than personal experience provides. In contrast to many other fields, from medicine to information technology, scientific research does not supply educators with powerful tools for improving what they do. But it could.

At the urging of NAS president Bruce Alberts, an initiative called the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) is looking for ways to change that. Our starting point is this: Education in the U.S. represents an expenditure of about 7% of GDP. It is a huge enterprise that serves some 52.7 million children in grades 1-12. And it is largely uninformed by research.

The goal of the NRC Strategic Education Research initiative is to find a way to make significant research findings part of the working vocabulary of teachers, school administrators, and education policy makers. The first phase of the initiative, described in Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and its Utilization (1999), proposed the general outlines for an ambitious 15-year program of research and implementation. The defining features of this SERP are:

Strategic Focus. Concentration on a few key issues-how people learn, student motivation, classroom and school environments that promote learning---will produce the critical mass of research needed for real advances in educational practice and student achievement.
A Program of Research that is Cumulative. The SERP plan calls for a long-term effort, a mix of experimental and field studies that are coordinated and iterative, enlivened and enriched by regular and systematic stock-taking, with input from teachers and other users, leading to course corrections.
New Collaborations. A primary goal envisioned by the NAS/NRC is that SERP would foster enduring relationships between the research community, educators, and policy makers so that research is influenced by the needs and insights of those who work most closely with students.
Creating Instruments of Effective Demand: An intended consequence of the SERP would be to develop and institutionalize the capacity of state and local practitioners to define their needs for research.

The NRC is now starting Phase 2 of the SERP planning initiative---the serious design phase. Over the next 18 months, a group of leading experts from the research, teaching, and policy communities and private industry will turn the SERP vision into a functional design for the organization of a large-scale research program. A key part of the charge to the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) Committee is to create an entity that can foster permanent improvements in student achievement by promoting the smooth, practiced, and effective use of high-quality research in educational settings. Perhaps the most critical challenge is to design an organizational structure that can apply very high standards of quality in producing, screening and vetting research findings. Many previous attempts to make research important to educational practice have foundered on this problem.

Functional design: Whether it is lodged in an existing institution or a new one, the infrastructure supporting SERP needs to:

focus the research community (cognitive, behavioral, organizational, and education researchers) on a limited, strategic set of problems that address educators needs;
provide a place to accumulate important research findings (both funded by SERP and from other sources) and draw out their implications for teaching and learning;
be an accessible place for teachers and policy makers to go for carefully screened, reliable knowledge;
build and support effective demand for research among practitioners.

Governance issues: Concern for independence and quality raises questions about where this 15-year, multi-million dollar research and implementation initiative should be lodged, how it can be buffered from political pressures, and how to attract large and stable funding flows of the kind that have sustained the NIH programs. In developing the SERP blueprint, the committee will consider a range of possible models--- public sector (a federal agency; an inter-agency partnership; a federal/state partnership); private sector; private, non-profit; and hybrid public/private entities. Also of concern is how SERP would relate to other important public and private institutions crucial to the support and effectiveness of education?

The Substantive Agenda: To complement this structural design task, a program of research, development, and implementation will be laid out for the15-year SERP. Panels of experts will explore two specific questions in depth:

In addition, the substantive agenda of SERP will be enriched by a closely related NRC Committee on Scientific Principles in Education Research, which is looking at what constitutes quality research in education and how the knowledge base generated from education research might cumulate.