NSF PR 02-69 - August 21, 2002
New Center to Expand on Lessons Learned From Successful
School Reforms
A new Data Research and Development Center being established
at the National Opinion Research Center at the University
of Chicago will enhance the ability of researchers
to understand how changes in the classroom improve
education and to promote the use of their findings
throughout the nation's schools.
To benefit from the lessons of school reform, policy
makers and researchers will need consistent information
about what works from classroom to classroom. By finding
ways to compare results from successful individual
improvement projects, researchers will have a much
more powerful set of data to draw upon to develop
new approaches that be generalized for schools across
the country.
The center, funded by a $6 million, five-year grant
from the National Science Foundation (NSF), will look
specifically at projects that have been shown to be
effective in improving reading, mathematics and science.
"Often investigators are unaware of how their findings
relate to work in other areas, or whether their findings
are consistent with results from more comprehensive
samples," said Barbara Schneider, senior research
scientist at NORC, and a principal investigator for
the project.
The center will work with researchers who have received
grants through the Interagency Educational Research
Initiative (IERI), a collaboration of NSF, the U.S.
Department of Education and the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development, and an effort
to improve pre-k-12 learning through integration of
information technologies. The center will try to identify
key features of successful educational programs. Ideally,
this knowledge could be applied to other programs
so that they, too, can be widely effective.
The new center at NORC will enable researchers on these
projects to become a community of scholars able to
share their knowledge about how to "scale up" effective
programs, through seminars, workshops, and intensive
courses for senior education professionals and policymakers,
graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty and
other researchers, Schneider said.
The center's research agenda will provide new insights
into learning, child and adolescent development, and
instruction. It will also chart changes over time
and help scholars learn how to extend effective approaches
to larger an more diverse populations.
Joining Schneider as co-principal investigators are
University of Chicago colleagues Larry Hedges, professor
of sociology; Colm O'Muircheartaigh, professor of
public policy, and David Sallach, Director of Social
Science Research Computing.
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