Roundtable Discussion II - Moderator: Adam Gamoran, University of Wisconsin-Madison

DR. GAMORAN: I'd like to welcome everybody to the afternoon session of our conference. We'll follow-up on this morning's exciting engagement with some fresh ideas and new perspectives on the topic of structured abstract as a way of communicating information about education research.

This panel consists of research users and brokers, people who convey information about education research to the consumers -- practitioners, policymakers, and the general public. So, this should give us a new and very valuable perspective on the question of whether structured abstracts would be helpful and useful in conveying information about education research.

We have four panelists with us. To my immediate is Gina Burkhardt, the Chief Executive Officer of Learning Point Associates. Learning Point operates the North-Central Regional Educational Laboratory with the important mission of being a bridge between research and educational practice.

Steve Olson is an education writer and editor, and he has written a lot in the science field, including Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins.

Debbie Viadero, you have seen the by-line, now meet the person, perhaps the best known writer about education research does that writing for Education Week.

And Terri Wilson is the Deputy Director of the What Works Clearinghouse, and is also Senior Program Specialist at the American Institutes for Research. She has done a great deal of work in convening national panels and expert panels in the area of health. And as Deputy Director of What Works she manages the systematic reviews of research studies.

To begin our conversation, we've got a set of framing questions which you are all welcome to look at. It's on the agenda. That will give you a sense of where we are going, how we have defined our task. To begin the conversation I will ask the first question of all the panelists.

So, we'll just go down the row, and I would like each panelist to explain what you do in your job with respect to conveying education research to a broader audience. Why and how you look to research. And to address the first of our framing questions, which is for what purposes and audiences do different users of research search for relevant articles? What's the process that you undertake?