Roundtable Participant: Gina Burkhardt, Learning Point Associates

MS. BURKHARDT: I want to first thank you for having me be part of this panel, and the opportunity to have this conversation. I think really I come from a very different perspective than many of you. Our organization does house the regional education laboratory, and we are a research and development organization. So, our role really is to be the translators of the research that is done for specific purposes for the field.

In our organization we do specifically work around adolescent literacy, data-driven decision-making, technology, after school programs, et cetera. Right now what we are finding -- and I thank you for the conversation earlier this morning, because you have convinced me that we still continue to have a major role in education as the translator, because if this is a demonstration of the kinds of conversations that researchers, my guess is that if you didn't have us, the work would never get to the field. So, I'm looking forward to a long, long career in education.

Basically, we serve practitioners and policymakers. And on the policymaking side, I think it was said earlier that if the information is more than a page, they are not going to read it. So, really we are pretty expert at translating the research undergirding a policy decision that our states and even national educators make, and we're really good at bringing sort of the neutral identity to the issue, so both sides of the issue are put forth. And recommendations for decisions are put forth, but we are not an advocacy group in that respect.

And on the practitioner side I can also tell you that the debate today about the use of abstracts in searching for research is a good one, and the debate about what should be in it is a really great one, but I bet it's a very different debate that is happening in the Chicago public schools today. And my guess is they are not even thinking about abstracts around the research.

So, again, it's our job to translate the research for the practitioners in a way that helps them make the right decisions about their practice. And for the most part, what we are finding is it's not necessarily the abstracts that do that, but really the syntheses and the reviews. And so, we can talk more later about how that moves forward in the field.