APPENDIX 2: Written Testimony, Biographies, Financial Hearing on Education Research: Is What We Don't Know Hurting Our Children? Subcommittee on Basic Research U.S. House of Representatives Statement of Dr. Judith S. Sunley Assistant Director (Interim) for Education and Human Resources National Science Foundation Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee -- thank you for the opportunity to testify on the very important issue of the current state of education research. This topic is timely and represents a vital and strategic national interest. In my remarks, I will address two issues: 1. The state of education research in general, the current education research program at NSF, and the direction that the NSF education research program is taking; and 2. The coordination of education research among federal agencies, including the interagency education research initiative (IERI); Education Research In General The state of education research is mixed but improving. Since the March 1997 release of the Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K-12 Education in the United States by the President's Committee of Advisors in Science and Technology, referred to as the PCAST Report, we have seen a proliferation of analyses and alarm bells from the general public, the education practitioner community, and the education research community itself about the state of education research. This development is not only healthy but also critical for marshaling the support for the bold shifts that effective classroom change will require. The public needs to know what works effectively in educating youngsters, with the type of relative certainty and closure that characterizes reports on medical clinical trial research, for example. The stakes are enormous. Large-scale reforms and improvements cost time and money, and in the case of failure or limited success, the loss becomes measured in missed opportunities, posing a bleaker outlook for children and for the nation's economic and social well being. But neither the past levels of funding for education research nor the localized and unique characteristics of the education system have lent themselves to an uncritical adaptation of clinical research methodologies. New funding for large-scale studies will help produce findings of sufficient generalizability to enable sustained and large-scale improvement in student learning. These results could make education research useful in public discourse and policymaking in ways that do not exist now. In order to elevate the debate, education research must credibly address the translation of findings into effective practice. The PCAST Report issued a clarion call to mobilize an ambitious effort of rigorous research to enable large-scale improvement in technologically rich K-12 classrooms. The Report has opened a window of opportunity by making a credible case that the current investment levels in education research are woefully inadequate for the challenges that we face. Failing to respond to this call would be irresponsible. However, if the efforts of PCAST and others succeed in galvanizing increased support for education research, only to see the added resources devoted to an enterprise that continues business as usual – or with only cosmetic changes - we would lose a tremendous opportunity. There are important bodies of knowledge, innovations and leaming technologies that the education research communities have produced (including many through the support of NSF). Yet the national educational research enterprise requires fundamental reinforcement and more urgent coupling of research insights with the complexities that teachers and students face in classrooms. The Current Education Research Program at NSF NSF is significantly reshaping and upgrading its education research to help face this national challenge. In FY99, NSF devoted approximately $60 million to educational research, largely in the Education and Human Resources (EHR) directorate. The education research program that NSF supported included the following activities: · Research in Education Policy and Practice (REPP). REPP has served since FY97 as the principle vehicle to solicit research across a spectrum of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education. This program merged earlier programs in Research on Teaching and Leaming (RTL), Applications of Advanced Technology (AAT), Networking Infrastructure for Education (NIE), and Studies and Indicators (S&I). REPP has just concluded its final competition, and guidelines for its successor program are in clearance and discussed below. The FY99 expenditure for REPP was approximately $24 million. · Special and Targeted Awards. While REPP is the principal research program, NSF supports a number of other activities, devoting approximately $8 million to these special awards. NSF co-funds TIMSS and now TIMSS-R through education research funds. This co- ✔ NSF funds the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study of Foundations of Assessment (FOA), examining new models of assessing student learning achievement. ✔ In FY96, NSF funded a major center at the University of Wisconsin to help organize major themes of education research. The National Institute for Science Education (NISE) is concluding a five-year cycle in FY00. NSF has issued special Dear Colleague Letters to solicit research on systemic reform. It also began supporting a major systemic reform research program at the University of Texas. • Learning and Intelligent Systems (LIS) / Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI). The pre-KDI awards include Collaborative Research in Learning Technology (CRLT) Centers that are among the most strategic mid-90's NSF cross-directorate activities. They have served as important models in post-PCAST report discussions. KDI awards totaled about $6 million in FY 1999, including other LIS awards and a highly visible knowledge networking project. • Inter-agency Education Research Initiative (IERI) ✓ NSF has just completed awarding the fourteen FY 1999 IERI grants, totaling $30 million ($22 million in NSF funds and $8 million from the Department of Education). More information on this inter-agency program follows.. The Direction of NSF's New Education Research Program IERI is one key element of NSF's evolving education research strategy. A broad, NSF-wide, long-term and comprehensive research program focusing on the science of learning is in active planning and discussion. Evolution of REPP to a program of Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) will proceed in FY2000. This new education research concept is designed to capitalize on NSF's excellence in supporting scientific research while approaching problems in educational research with tools and methods that were previously unavailable. The science of learning effort will involve all NSF directorates. It seeks to attract neuroscientists who are willing to explore a shift from the traditional focus in this field on impairment or dysfunctionality, to a focus on the functionality of learning, with a view to positioning their work on a path that will serve cognitive science and eventually educational practice. Advances in these and related areas, such as neural networking, language development, psycholinguistics, attention, memory, and concept acquisition, concurrent with the development of instruments such as functional MRI, are unfolding rapidly. They have the potential to reshape the questions and answers at the heart of implementing education research. For example, functional MRI (fMRI) permits the mapping of neural pattems that correspond to different activities or behaviors. Indeed, some of this research is already producing striking results. For example, recent investigations on neural processes show that computational skill and ability to estimate computational results require two different brain functionalities. Thus, instructional practice should not be limited to developing either computational skills or concept-oriented estimation, but must acknowledge the importance of both and determine how and under what conditions each can spur the other. In an example of the need for collaboration across disciplines, research has cast doubts on simplified left-brain/right-brain dichotomies that are nonetheless still held in popular view. Without overstating the promise of instrumentation such as fMRI, we believe that ongoing productive cooperation between education and neuroscience research will greatly benefit from a cadre of researchers at home in both areas. Our approach to deepening this scientific foundation will proceed in a strategic, measured and closely monitored fashion on the steps of NSF's Leaming and Intelligent Systems (LIS) program. LIS has demonstrated the strategies that work for bringing together multidisciplinary teams to examine leaming. We will continue to support biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, psychologists, and cognitive scientists in the LIS community who are uncovering the mechanisms of learning. The National Research Council's How People Learn study is a signal development bringing attention to this area. The "main event remains science and mathematics education research within education settings. The education research program we are pursuing not only attempts to institutionalize the methodological improvements of LIS and IERI (discussed below) and to secure a deep scientific foundation in knowledge about learning, but to understand learning, teaching and education in what we call complex systems of practice. Complaints about education research often and rightly focus on lack of generalizability of findings obtained from small-scale studies. One finding is ironically quite generalizable – educational research that does not acknowledge and account for system complexity is almost never generalizable. The dynamics that comprise educational systems render greenhouse studies of new curricular or pedagogical approaches irrelevant, no matter how sound the methods or experimentation. Thus, the new education research concept may be described as consisting of an overlapping four-quadrant continuum (brain research as foundation for research on human learning, human leaming research, research on learning in educational settings, and learning in complex educational systems). The current REPP program has primarily focused on the third of these elements. A discussion of the direction that NSF is taking in its education research program should highlight steps the agency is taking to build communication between and among research, practitioner, and policy-making communities. EHR is attempting to help stimulate higher visibility and usability of education research within the agency through a Research Forum. The purpose of the Research Forum is to examine issues to bolster the research foundations for EHR's implementation programs and to help the directorate promote a culture where research is seamlessly and ubiquitously a part of thinking and planning, not only within the directorate but also among awardees. EHR is working to build bridges among fragmented research communities; to entice more scientists to undertake research that will advance NSF's mission; to work more productively with other directorates, and to ensure that NSF can harvest the powerful yields from its existing cross-directorate research efforts in LIS. This is a detailed and integrated strategy that includes new ways of engaging practitioners, important briefings in the field, and presenting to researchers, decision-makers, and practitioners important syntheses of credible research findings. Education Research Coordination Between Federal Agencies and the Inter-Agency Education Research Initiative (IERI) IERI is a strategic inter-agency opportunity that the participating agencies (NSF, Department of Education, National Institute of Child Health and Development) forged in direct response to the PCAST report and to other important developments in the work that they were supporting. The goal of the IERI is to support the development and wide dissemination of research-proven, technology-enabled educational strategies that improve the learning of core subjects (reading, mathematics and science) from pre-K through grade 12, as well as teacher instruction in these core areas. Among distinguishing characteristics (within the first year focal areas of early childhood reading and mathematics and teacher professional development), IERI's initial research projects meet a highly credible methodological threshold and will conduct hypothesisdriven longitudinal studies that produce broadly generalizable findings. As IERI moves into its second year, with expanded emphasis on reading, mathematics and science learning and teaching in later grades, the management group has agreed to maintain these methodological standards and to require elements that most first-year projects already include. These include the scalability of approaches on which the research focuses; interdisciplinarity of the research team; and the integral use of leaming technologies. A summary of the first fourteen IERI awards is attached. It is critical to realize that IERI not only elevates the quality of projects the partner agencies support, but it has also helped to reshape the way the agencies interact with each other. IERI cannot succeed without some of the best that each agency has to offer. NIH has brought to the table an important tradition of methodological rigor, and attention to issues of cognitive and neuro-cognitive aspects of learning. The agencies adopted the NSF merit review process for its credibility with the research community. The Department of Education's far reach into schools and its mission to advance education practice provides the critical entrée to a more strategic approach to federal education research investments. NSF provided approximately two-thirds of the support for IERI's first year. But the issues of IERI transcend an analysis of the agency funding shares from year to year. The collaboration has been one vehicle for enhancing the ways in which the Office of Educational Research and Improvement does business. For example, the peer review process that OERI is effecting is an amalgam of the highly respected practices of NIH and NSF. It is designed to ensure that the research OERI supports on its own is of high quality. IERI's explicit attention to scalability of innovation and improved educational practice is especially well suited to the Department's broader education mission. From an agency standpoint, the Department of Education's growing ability to mount a high-quality education research program of sufficient scale is a key element of the collaboration. This may not be a typical inter-agency stance, but we do not have the luxury of indulging old patterns of agency interaction. IERI requires researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries to form stronger and more effective teams. It requires researchers and practitioners to collaborate in different ways to pursue what might be referred to as large-scale and use-inspired research. In the same way that the researchers and practitioners are breaking molds in working together, so must the agencies as the they manage the effort, to build the credible research base needed to produce large improvements in our educational enterprise. It is particularly gratifying and important for this partnership to include NIH. The three-way partnership strengthens the agency synergies and intellectually expands the reach of the initiative. Summary We are pursuing with our agency partners a vision of use-inspired education research that: • Engages new scientific and educational partnerships and communities; Insists on deep coupling of research and practice; • Builds a previously unavailable foundation of scientific knowledge of learning; and Capitalizes on the unparalleled technological explosion of our times. The answer to the question that motivated this hearing, "Is what we don't know hurting our children?" is yes. Also, what we know and don't use weakens our educational system and, thus, hurts our children. Asked differently, "Can what we discover through research and its effective application improve help our children's leaming and future?” we answer, resoundingly, yes. Thank you very much. |