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NSF Press Release

 


NSF PR 02-69 - August 21, 2002

Media contact:

 Bill Harms

 (703) 292-8070

 wharms@nsf.gov

Program contact:

 Michael Martinez

 (703) 292-4614

 mmartine@nsf.gov

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.

-NSF-

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