NSF's new education research direction is designed to capitalize on our excellence in supporting scientific research while approaching problems in educational research with tools and methods that were previously unavailable. It may be described as covering and overlapping four-part continuum, beginning with brain research as a foundation, and moving through human learning research, research on learning and educational settings, and learning in complex educational systems. Advances in neuroscience and related areas, concurrent with the development of instruments such as functional MRI, are unfolding rapidly. Their potential to reshape the questions and answers at the heart of education research provides the impetus for expanding the focus on brain and human learning research. The National Research Council's How People Learn study is a signal development bringing attention to this area. However, the main event for NSF remains science and mathematics education research within education settings. The education research program we are pursing will also help us understanding learning, teaching, and education in what we call complex systems of practice. One finding of educational research that is, ironically, very generalizable is that research that does not acknowledge and account for system complexity is almost never generalizable. The Interagency Education Research Initiative provides a strategic interagency opportunity that is an important element of NSF's planning for the future. The three agencies represented on this panel developed the effort in response to the PCAST report, and its goal is to support the development and wide dissemination of research-proven technology-enabled educational strategies that improve the learning of core subjects from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, as well as teacher instruction in these core areas. IERI insists on a highly credible methodological threshold, scalability of approach, interdisciplinarity of the research team, and the integral use of learning technologies. It is critical to realize that IERI has helped to reshape the way the agencies interact with one another. IERI cannot succeed without some of the best that each agency has to offer. IERI requires researchers and practitioners to collaborate in different ways to pursue what might be referred to as large-scale and use-inspired research. So must the agencies collaborate in building the credible research base needed to produce large improvements in our educational enterprise. In sum, we are pursuing both within NSF and with our agency partners a vision of 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 and learning; and capitalizes on the unparalleled technological explosion of our times. Thank you. Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Sunley. Dr. McGuire. TESTIMONY OF C. KENT MCGUIRE, ASSISTANT SECRETARY, OFFICE OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AND IMPROVEMENT, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, DC Dr. MCGUIRE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak before the committee this afternoon. You have my written testimony. It is perhaps a bit more historical than I might like, but I think it accurately portrays the work that my agency does and what is currently underway, so I do recommend it to the committee. In my five minutes, I just would like to do two things. I would like to put the current work in education research, particularly the work that my office supports, in perspective; help you see it the way I see it. And then secondly, give you a sense of where my agency I believe needs to go and the direction I am working to set for it. I hope you will want to watch us with interest over the next year, because I do think the work that OERI needs to be doing really bears substantially on and connects to the work of some of the other agencies represented here. Just a few comments about education research in general. The central point that I would want to make here is that education is really a complex, human, social, real world venture. At best, it is a profession; it is not an academic discipline. As in medicine or, perhaps more appropriately, health, many disciplines are relevant to the work we do here. It is necessary for understanding how to improve education. It deals with the learning of individual students, the teaching of individual teachers, and yet we know both teachers and students vary widely in terms of their talent, interest, and cultural backgrounds, and so on. And it is all this complexity that makes research in education so challenging. Add to that the fact that we care here about children as fellow citizens, and we know how emersed education is in issues of education, in values, hopes, and desires in ways that can even at times place the relevance of objective study or science up for questioning. This is the context in which education research is done. Now maybe in medicine, which is also complex, there is this same complexity. But here we seem to understand and read, in ways that we do not in education, what the objects of study are. And it is only when people and social organizations come into the picture, as in behavioral medicine or public health, that the complexity that you find in education is revealed. So there is no getting away from this complexity. And I would argue this is context in which much of the education research that my office has supported over the last 15 or 20 years has occurred. Let me just say a few things about that work. This year we will fund research somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million, and a corresponding amount in applied work through regional educational labs. I would argue that work really is best characterized in four ways. A good part of it, some of this work does concern itself with basic questions of how people learn. It has been an area where over the last 10 to 15 years a fair amount of work has been done to really work out a set of learning theories. Another way of thinking about the work we have supported is that we have a long tradition of research that monitors the education system and its performance, both through the secondary analysis of data and to attention to questions of measurement in the development of indicators of educational effectiveness. A third way of thinking about the work we do is to know that a considerable amount of it currently supports and is concerned with documenting effective educational practice, as observed in the field, in schools, or in classrooms. This, to make a fourth observation, is leading to a growing interest in program design and the development of models that assemble what we currently know in the form of strategies that teachers and other educators can use to take advantage in real time of the knowledge that is based in research. But I want to concur with an observation of Dr. Sunley, that I think what we are starting to realize is that we need many more studies that are explicitly concerned with the implementation of specific ideas in research, intervention studies, if you will, where we have taken care to mount them in a large enough way to be meaningful and to take full advantage of what we know in method so that the results from these studies give rise to evidence that we think we can in fact trust. I think this is what we have in mind in the so-called IERI because it is explicitly concerned with these things. Just a word or two about the future direction for OERI, and then I will be done. I think the central challenge for me is to confront becoming ever more strategic at OERI. When you look at the work that we currently do, what you find is that our competitions have been quite broad, and we seek proposals for work across the full range of important topics in education. It turns out that it is difficult to really use criteria such as national significance, intellectual merit, or breadth of impact when you have such a wide open call to support research. I am trying to get us much more focused on a few really important problems and then to go after these problems in really strategic ways. That is what I think is signalled in the work of the National Research Council, it is what I think is behind the Interagency Education Research Initiative. We will need a lot more money to do it, but I think it is exactly where my office needs to go. Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. McGuire. TESTIMONY OF G. REID LYON, CHIEF, CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND BEHAVIOR BRANCH, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH, BETHESDA, MD Dr. LYON. Mr. Chairman, this hearing has been titled "Is What We Don't Know Hurting Our Children?" Well, the NICHD would respond clearly in the affirmative. We would also suggest that the title could be expanded to read "Not Using and Applying What We Do Know is Definitely Hurting Our Children." As I have pointed out in my written testimony, much educational research suffers from a lack of rigor, a tendency toward the short term, and the philosophical and the ideological, and a lack of translational clarity. But I also try to point out in my testimony that at the NICHD within the NIH we have been engaged in sys tematic, longitudinal, multidisciplinary, large-scale research to try to understand very specific, focused questions. What I would like to discuss with you today is an example of that, and it is in the area of reading. We are concerned about reading, reading development, reading difficulties, and reading instruction because of the substantial negative impact that not learning to read has on our Nation's children. I would like to show you what I mean if I could, if you could watch the monitors. [Video clip shown.] Dr. LYON. As we know this young lady, who is now 23, who has been with us since 5 in a major longitudinal study, when she says "The end," she not only wants to leave that session, she has wanted to leave school. The NICHD has studied this issue for 34 years. And within that context, we have studied 34,521 children to determine what does it take to learn how to read, what goes wrong, as you just saw, when you don't, and what you do about it. In 11 clinical trials that have been ongoing for now 10 years, we are finally beginning to understand the types of instructional procedures that in combination work best for individual children. What you see on your screen now is, with the top line showing our normal controls, youngsters like that you saw on the screen starting out below the 10th percentile and moving within a year to two years period of time right up to the average range. In the main, these graphs suggest that for most children identified as having difficulties learning to read, which ranges from 22 percent to 59 percent in our different States, all but about 5 percent to 7 percent of these children, if we do it right, if we identify them early, can be brought up to a substantial level of reading capability. For example, as we are looking at different instructional conditions with our Nation's schools in classrooms, we find that those procedures that work, for example, the top one that says "PASP," which is just a combined instructional approach, these youngsters had the lowest rate of grade failure compared to other approaches which are most frequently used in our Nation's schools and which are most frequently taught to our Nation's teachers. Likewise, in terms of referral to special education services, certain approaches definitely have a greater integrity and power with children, but those approaches are not typically taught to our Nation's teachers and not typically used in public schools. And there remains a substantial lacuna or gap between what in the world we know and what is in fact practiced in schools. Converging with this type of study are substantial studies in the neurosciences. We are looking at children with a number of different neuroimaging modalities and technologies. We have nice converging evidence now mapping those neurosystems that seem to subserve or undergird the reading process. You are looking at a normal signature now, or a cartoon of a normal signature. These are coronal slices, or down through the head slices. If you will just look at the yellow dots, those show the differences in how the brain handles particular language information from normal in kids who do not read. That shows the extent of difference in many children who do not learn to read in particular defined areas of the nervous system. What we are doing now, the children, and like those children that you saw on the screen, first are imaged across a number of sites in the country, we then enroll them in clinical trials, and we are attempting to try to understand which instructional procedures have the most power, and, as reading behavior improves, does in fact neurophysiology come along beside it. Better said, does neurophysiology change such that we know that brain is changing to support more improved behavior. The difficulties we continue to face have to do with what both my collaborators in the IERI have talked about already, and that is taking information that we still need to learn, and taking information that we know now, and scaling that to a level that can actually enhance the education of a larger number of children, information that we can use to inform teacher preparation, which, frankly, is the black hole in all of this, so that the best productive practices can be employed to benefit our Nation's children. What you saw on the screen does not have to be. Thank you. Chairman SMITH. Very good, Dr. Lyon. Thank you. TESTIMONY OF ALEXANDRA K. WIGDOR, ASSOCIATE EXECU- Dr. WIGDOR. Good afternoon. I would like to pass on the greetings of Dr. Bruce Alberts, the President of the National Academy of Sciences, who is very interested in these issues. He is a cellular biologist who makes education his avocation and he is very interested in trying to strengthen the connection between research and practice. I am here to talk to you today about this report "Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Implementation." This is a plan that proposes that we as a country undertake what the field of education has sorely lacked; that is, sustained research that is scientifically rigorous and focused on the practical problems of improving teaching and learning. The plan described in this report is really based on three propositions. The first of them is that there is an emerging science of learning that has important implications for the design of curricula, instruction, assessment, and learning environments. A recent report that the NRC produced, a study supported by the Office of Education Research and Improvement, called "How People Learn, Brain, Mind, Experience and School," came very strongly and powerfully to the conclusion that we do know a whole lot from the cognitive sciences, from developmental psychology, from neuroscience, from many other fields about human learning that has important implications for what goes on in schools. The report has dozens and dozens of important insights. I would like to just share one of them with you quickly. From a number of different strands of research, it is very clear that competence, be it in expert chess players or musicians or competent grade school and high school students, competence depends |