RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING RESEARCH PRIORITIES

An Advisory Report to the National Educational Research

Policy and Priorities Board

National Academy of Education

March, 1999
National Academy of Education

President

Ellen C. Lagemann, New York University

Executive Council

Ann L. Brown, University of California at Berkeley

Anthony S. Bryk, University of Chicago

James G. Greeno, Stanford University and the Institute for Research on Learning

Carl F. Kaestle, Brown University

Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University

Magdalene Lampert, University of Michigan

Andrew C. Porter, University of Wisconsin

Alan H. Schoenfeld, University of California at Berkeley

Executive Director

Kerith Gardner
Study Group to Develop Recommendations Regarding Research Priorities

Co-Principal Investigators

Ann L. Brown, University of California at Berkeley

James G. Greeno, Stanford University and the Institute for Research on Learning

Study Director

Debbie Leong-Childs
Panel on Strengthening the Capacity of the Research System

Chair

Lauren B. Resnick, University of Pittsburgh

Members

A. Wade Boykin, CRESPAR/Howard University

Anthony S. Bryk, University of Chicago

Allan Collins, Boston College and Northwestern University

Thomas Glennan, Rand Corporation

Janice Jackson, Boston College

Gaea Leinhardt, University of Pittsburgh

Walter Secada, University of Wisconsin

Mary Kay Stein, University of Pittsburgh

Roland G. Tharp, University of California at Santa Cruz
Panel on Critical Transitions in Learning and Development

Chair

Hugh Mehan, University of California at San Diego

Members

Courtney Cazden, Harvard University

Eugene Garcia, University of California at Berkeley

Margaret Hauben, Chabot Observatory and Science Center

Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University

Glynda Hull, University of California at Berkeley

Angela Lintz, University of California at San Diego

Raymond McDermott, Stanford University

Jeannie L. Oakes, University of California at Los Angeles

James Stigler, University of California at Los Angeles
Panel on Teacher Professional Development and Communities

Chair

Magdalene Lampert, University of Michigan

Members

Deborah L Ball, University of Michigan

David K. Cohen, University of Michigan

Beth Grzelak, University of Michigan

Teresa McMahon, University of Michigan

Kathy Morris, University of Michigan

Carol Lee, Northwestern University

Judith Warren Little, University of California at Berkeley

Lynn Paine, Michigan State University

Lauren Pfeiffer, South Lyon, Michigan

Edward A. Silver, University of Pittsburgh

Joan Talbert, Stanford University

Ken Zeichner, University of Wisconsin
Table of Contents

Executive Summary.................................................................................................. 8

I. Introduction......................................................................................................... 18

II. Strengthening Research Capacity for Improving Education.............................. 26

II.1. The Panel’s Mission................................................................................ 26

II.2. Models for Research and Practice.......................................................... 28

II.3. Problem-Solving Research and Development........................................ 32

II.4. Ensuring Usefulness Beyond the Research Site...................................... 35

II.5. Linking Problem-Solving Projects for Maximum Capacity Building.... 39

II.6. Incentives and Long-Term Capacity Building....................................... 42

II.7. Organizing to Commission, Support, and Carry Out ProblemSolving Research and Development................................................ 45

II.8. Relations with Research in the Basic and Applied Quadrants................ 49

III. Critical Transitions in the Lives of Low-Income Students................................ 51

III.1. Background........................................................................................... 51

III.2. Current Research That Can Support Productive Work in Policy

and Practice.................................................................................... 53

III.3. Topics of Needed Research With Potential for Advances in

Policy and Practice......................................................................... 56

III.4. Summary.............................................................................................. 63

IV. Teachers’ Professional Development................................................................ 65

IV.1. The Panel’s Mission.............................................................................. 65

IV.2. What We Known and What We Need to Know................................. 66

IV.3. Proposed Research Priorities................................................................ 78

IV.4. Conclusion........................................................................................... 86
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

I. Introduction

The National Academy of Education conducted a study leading to recommendations to the National

Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board regarding priorities for OERI’s research agenda. The

study was directed toward research priorities that would further progress toward high achievement for

all students, adopted by the Board as the goal of its research agenda. The study focused on three

topics, each addressed by a panel:

• Strengthening the capacity of research for contributing to educational improvement

• Critical transitions in learning and development

• Teaching, teachers’ professional development, and professional communities of teachers

By selecting these topics, we do not imply that they are the only important issues that the Board should

consider in setting its priorities. Among the other areas also in need of research are matters of

assessment, public policy (including school finance), and learning environments that utilize modern

technology. Although this report deals only with a limited set of topics for research, all of the issues we

present are important, and all should be given high priority by the Board.

A general theme of the findings and recommendations is that progress toward high achievement for

all students has been impeded by the belief that research, students’ learning, and teachers’ learning can

be studied in isolation from important matters of context. Research should not be assumed to be

separate from efforts to improve educational processes, but rather to be part of collaborative activities

that may be conceived as problem-solving research and development. The aspects of students’ learning

involving acquiring information and skills need to be understood in relation to students' understanding of

general principles, and students' learning in school needs to be understood in relation to students'

activities and identities outside of school. Teachers’ development should not be understood as simply

acquiring skills and knowledge, but as constantly studying, experimenting, and reflecting on the

management of complex practices and professional careers.

II. An Initiative to Strengthen the Links Between Educational Research and Improvement

A more effective system to link research with practice and policy is needed, because of the scope

and magnitude of the educational problems we are seeking to solve. New levels of intellective

competence will be needed by our whole population, and to accomplish this, the education system

needs to be strengthened fundamentally around powerful pedagogies and new forms of organization that

make it possible for all of our diverse students to learn core concepts and knowledge along with the

basic skills and capacities for thinking and reasoning they will need in the course of their lives.
To progress toward an infrastructure that can support a more productive relation between research

and educational practice, members of the study group recommend that the Department of Education

initiate a long-term effort to develop support of collaborative educational research and improvement

based on a new model of the relationship between these activities. The model, articulated by Donald

Stokes in Pasteur’s Quadrant,1 is fundamentally different from the model of research, development,

dissemination, and evaluation (RDDE) as a mainly linear process. Instead, Stokes argued (with many

supporting examples) that inquiry and invention can be categorized as low or high in their potential for

advancing understanding of general explanatory principles and as low or high in their potential for

betterment of a social problem.

The NAE study group recommends that OERI begin an important new program of research in

“Pasteur’s quadrant,” which should be focused explicitly on solving specific current problems of

practice and at the same time should be accountable for developing and testing general principles of

education that can be expected to apply broadly beyond the particular places in which the research is

done.

The central idea in the study group’s proposal is to develop a system of support for projects in

which professional researchers and professional educators share in the accountability for achieving

success in improving educational practices and outcomes. These projects may also include program

developers, curriculum specialists, or policy specialists. All the participants share in a commitment to

and accountability for multiple outcomes of the work:

• tangible improvement of a complex educational system, responsive to the circumstances of that

system’s functioning and according to documentable criteria

• development of materials, personnel, and other resources to support transport of the aims,

operational concepts, and methods that are developed in the project to other sites in which people

want to adopt those aims, concepts, and methods (“travel”)

• contributions to the research literature that documents the results of these efforts and provides the

forum in which alternative explanatory principles are developed, evaluated, and clarified, so that the

results of these projects will cumulatively advance society’s understanding of general principles of

educational practices and processes.

The study group recommends that in selecting projects for support, segments of the population and

topics for study should be chosen to promote greater equity. Programs that should be given high priority

would promote student understanding in schools that serve disadvantaged communities, would develop

high levels of literacy and other competencies for students who are now denied them, would move

toward making good education in urban in urban school districts the rule rather than an exception, and

would advance productive uses of modern technology in schools that serve children of poor families.
The recommendation’s novelty is in proposing that commitment to these goals and accountability for

them should be shared by all of the participants in the project, rather than being separate responsibilities

of distinct communities of educational practitioners, developers, and researchers working on separate

projects. Of course, the participants will come to these projects with differing expertise, differing career

trajectories, and, finally, accountabilities to different communities in which they are primarily affiliated.

The challenge of building this new kind of enterprise for educational research and improvement will be

to find mechanisms of support, review, participation, and evaluation that value the joint achievements of

these multifaceted teams.

We want to be very clear that our recommendation is not to replace support for basic research and

for applied research and development activities with integrated problem-solving research and

development. Rather, we believe that this kind of integrated work should be added to the program of

activities supported by the Department of Education and should be closely integrated with both

fundamental and applied research, which the Department should continue to support vigorously. Figure

1 shows the diagram that Stokes used to represent the relationship between the three main kinds of

research and improvement that has been productive historically. The central role of what Stokes called

“use-inspired basic research,” which we call “collaborative problem-solving research and development”

in this report, is a crucial aspect of our belief that our recommendation could greatly strengthen the

ability of the educational research system to serve the nation’s educational practices and outcomes.

 

pure basic 

research

purely applied 

research and 

development

existing 

understanding

existing 

technology 

and practice

improved 

understanding

improved 

technology 

and practice

use-inspired 

basic research

Figure 1. A revised dynamic model.2

Our report outlines several components of a system of collaborative educational research and

improvement, which was developed in the deliberations of the panel on Strengthening the Capacity of

the Research System. The recommendations include supporting federations of problem-solving research
and development projects, linked in a hub-and-spoke relationship. The goal would be simultaneously to

develop improved educational success in specific settings (the spokes) and to identify issues of common

concerns and to carry out theoretical analyses and construct tools that are supported by and facilitate

the work of the several projects in integrative ways (the hub).

The program we recommend calls for new forms of research organization that are focused on

practice and on engaging researchers and practitioners together in problem solving and theoretical

analysis. There are precedents for the kind of problem-solving research and development we

recommend, but many questions remain about what the most effective forms of organization for such

research will be in the long run. In the spirit of joining research and practice, therefore, we recommend a

measured start-up for this new program. A limited number of projects can be mounted in the beginning,

developed through an iterative process of on-the-ground design and redevelopment, and then carefully

analyzed both by participants and by the broader educational research and practice community.

Expansion of the program can then be based on solid experience in how to manage forms of research

and development that are focused directly on solving problems of educational practice and public

policy.

We believe that this proposal will require grappling with some of the most persistent and deeply

ingrained problems of our day: for example, getting all students to read by the third grade, effectively

remediating reading problems that persist into the middle and high schools, and improving the quality of

instruction in urban school districts. It will mean tackling problems that have social as well as academic

roots, questioning the social arrangements of schooling (e.g., tracking), and taking seriously the charge

to create good citizens as well as an educated workforce.

III. Research on Learning to Support High Achievement for All Students

The NAE study group’s recommendations regarding critical transitions in the learning and

development of students, especially low-income students, focus on two sets of issues. One involves

transitions that students must accomplish in order to progress successfully through the school curriculum.

The other concerns transitions that involve the social organization of learning in schools and its relation to

the activities of students in the rest of their lives.

Teaching and Learning in School

The NAE study group recommends a high priority for research on critical transitions, which include

important developments in conceptual understanding as students move through the school curriculum, as

well as movements between the school and other communities of students' social life and work. A

general problem is that to achieve at high levels, students must succeed in critical transitions that require

mastery in general aspects of knowing and understanding that are often not explicitly taught. The

expectations in school for these general aspects of understanding and learning do not match equally well
with the expectations and practices of all students, and the transitions are much easier for students for

whom the school practices are in close alignment with the practices the students bring from home. This

difference is generally unfavorable to students of low income.

The study group’s recommendations focus on mathematics and reading in the lower and upper

grades. This does not mean that we are uninterested in, for example, history; indeed, both the NAE

study group and a group of educational practitioners they convened as consultants urge attention to the

development of civic responsibility. But if one cannot read complex texts fluently, one cannot study

multiple texts in order to understand history. And if one cannot understand notions such as probability

and chance, one is excluded from the communities of scientists and mathematicians.

Reading. Difficulty in reading in the early grades is a primary reason for school failure. The National

Research Council report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children synthesizes research that

establishes the importance of early reading as a crucial first step in school success and describes the

components of effective early literacy programs. Now research is needed to analyze how these

recommendations are or are not implemented in K-3 programs and what factors lead to success and

difficulties. There also is a need for research on how students become facile at reading complex text

needed to understand advanced academic subjects such as history, social science, mathematics, and

science.

Second Language Learning. The National Research Council report Improving Schooling for

Language Minority Children provides a comprehensive synthesis of research concerning the

education of linguistically and culturally diverse populations. Now we need to know (1) what specific

educational interventions work well for specific populations of English Language Learners, (2) the shortand long-term academic and non-academic effects of these interventions, and (3) the techniques of

assessment that can measure accurately the competence of English Language Learners.

Important transition points in the process of English language learning include: (1) the transition from

the first oral language to English; (2) the transition from oral language to literacy; and (3) the transition

into “academic discourse” (when a student engages written material in math, history, social science

studies, etc., and uses the vocabulary and conventions of these disciplines in discourse). Research is

needed on these critical transitions in the educational trajectories of English Language Learners

(bidialectal as well as bilingual). In addition to making the transition to a new language, English Language

Learners must learn new identities and cultural practices. For example, the language that ELLs use at

home or on the playground develops differently from the language they use in the classroom. This

situation is exacerbated by the fact that immigrant students arrive in the US at all ages, levels of

education, and levels of literacy.
Mathematics. Difficulty in early mathematics is another important reason for school failure.

Evidence suggests that many young children enjoy school mathematics and are good at it, but that

starting at fourth or fifth grade, significant numbers of students start to have difficulty with the subject and

to dislike it. At this point and others, there is often a transition in the nature of the mathematics being

studied: e.g., the curriculum moves from the study of concrete objects to more abstract ideas. Research

is needed on why students have so much trouble making the transitions and understanding formal

representations, multiplicative reasoning, and essential mathematical and statistical concepts such as

chance, randomness, and probability.

The Social Organization of Learning

The NAE study group concludes that high achievement for all students will not be accomplished by

policies and practices that only consider students’ activities in school without taking account of the

competencies and practices that students, especially low-income students, develop in the rest of their

lives. Several recommendations of the study group focus on ways in which the social arrangements of

learning in school, as well as the content of school learning activities, need to be studied and understood

to inform policies and practices that can lead to high achievement for all students.

Learning from Out-of-School Opportunities. Research on youth organizations, after-school clubs,

and other learning environments shows that children from impoverished backgrounds display

competence out of school that is often superior to the competence they display in school. We need to

work with schools to make institutional use of this competence. The challenge is to design and test

different models of after-school and summer programs that would best motivate, engage, and benefit

low-income children.

Transitions to Out-of-School Activities. The hours after school and during vacations play critical

roles in enabling academic success; evidence that a student can develop learning and commitment in

extracurricular and after-school activities is now accepted as part of preparation for admission into

higher education. Moreover, research suggests that in low-income communities high levels of

participation in youth organizations, after-school clubs, and other non-school environments not only

extend, activate, and enhance school learning but also allow children to display their abilities and earn

praise. We need to know more about (1) types and features of after-school opportunities that most

effectively motivate academic achievement and positive self-estimations; and (2) how to design and test

different models of collaboration between schools and community groups dedicated to providing strong

learning environments for low-income children.

Alternatives to Curriculum Differentiation. Retention, pull-out remediation programs, tracking,

and segregated special education programs that stratify opportunities to learn by race, class, and gender
do not result in high achievement for all students. Practitioners and researchers now need to collaborate

to develop alternative strategies to promote the cognitive and social development of low-income

students.

Academic Benefits of Heterogeneity and Diversity. There is considerable evidence to show that

academically demanding, heterogeneous grouping is beneficial for previously low-achieving students.

There is considerably less evidence to show the benefits of heterogeneous grouping for high-achieving

students. Therefore a vital research question demanding an answer is: Do previously low- and

previously high-achieving students benefit from heterogeneous grouping? Do students from white,

middle-income families as well as students from low-income, ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds

benefit from these practices?

Generative Processes of Heterogeneous Grouping. As indicated immediately above, research

has shown that there can be significant beneficial outcomes to heterogeneous grouping. Much less is

known about the processes that contribute to beneficial outcomes. More generally, although there is a

large literature on “cooperative learning,” that literature offers little wisdom regarding instructional

practices that foster student engagement with the subject-matter content and result in the collaborative

processes that produce learning. Therefore we need to develop a more complete inventory of

knowledge about the effective practices for teaching academically challenging curricula in groups in

general, and in heterogeneous groups in particular.

IV. Research to Understand Teaching as a Professional Practice Developed Continuously

Throughout One’s Career

The NAE study group recommends that a high priority be given to a sustained, comprehensive, and

coherent program of research in support of teachers’ professional development. Without improving our

understanding of what it will take to produce a well-prepared and professional corps of teachers, school

improvement will not be possible. Students living in poverty and ethnic minorities have been historically

underserved by American educational institutions and are an increasingly large proportion of the student

population. No one doubts that teachers will have much to learn in the years to come in order to be

successful in helping all students reach high levels of achievement. There should be a particular concern

with producing new knowledge about connections between professional development and improving

education for currently underserved populations, namely children and adolescents whose experiences

and dispositions do not match with the expectations and social organization of schools.

General goals of this program of research should be to strengthen knowledge and understanding of:

• how changes in teaching practice can bring about improvements in students’ learning, particularly for

students of low income
• how teachers’ professional development can bring about improvements in teaching practices

• how the work of teaching and activities aimed at professional development can be organized to

support improvements throughout teachers’ careers.

The recommended research program would adopt the perspective that teaching is a complex

practice and consider the continuous learning of teaching across the teacher’s career as an integral part

of that practice. In supporting research with this perspective, OERI would support a significant shift

from most previous research on teacher learning, which has focused primarily on the acquisition of skills,

dispositions, and knowledge with little attention to how these play out in what teachers do or in what

students learn.

Linking Changes in Teaching Practice with Improved Student Learning. There is a compelling

need for research linking teaching and learning that can inform the national debate about aims in

education, standards, and equity. We also need to provide information that can guide teachers and

institutions who want to change their educational practice, particularly to reduce inequities in the

opportunities of students who differ in socioeconomic status, ethnic background, and gender to learn

successfully. This is especially important regarding the achievement of deep intellective competence

advocated in current educational reforms. In order to take advantage of current efforts to improve

teaching and learning, this research should be carried out where active programs of educational reform

are already under way as well as in programs specifically designed to examine the relationship between

teacher development and student learning.

The research we need would examine fundamental issues about the nature of teaching and learning,

including, but not limited to, the importance of the skills and knowledge of teachers. It would place

teachers’ skills and knowledge in the context of a broader understanding of instruction by investigating

the role of intentional action in the social systems of classrooms and schools and by taking account of

the nature of social relationships in which teachers and students interact to support students’ learning. It

would expand our knowledge and understanding of teaching practices that are successful with students

who bring different cultural resources to their own and other students’ learning. It would also study

relationships among the effects of teaching and relevant contextual factors, including the resources

available for teachers to use in their work, the sizes and social climates of schools and classes, and the

ways that schools and teachers interact with parents and other groups in their communities. It would

examine, much more than past research has done, issues of what it takes to do effective and successful

teaching with diverse populations of students.

Linking Teachers’ Professional Development and Teaching Practices. We need to go beyond

the vague notion of “applying knowledge and skill” to understand what effective teachers do and how

they do it. Successful teaching involves much more than the exercise of skills and the application of
knowledge. It also requires flexible improvisational adaptation in circumstances that emerge in the

complex human interactions that constitute classroom activity. We need research to develop general

understanding of these capabilities—the often invisible, but fundamentally professional actions that make

learning in classrooms possible—and also to develop understanding of their growth in professional

learning. This would include research to understand the roles of increased knowledge and

comprehension of subject-matter concepts and methods, the role of thorough understanding of the

curriculum in the subject and at the level one is teaching and in relation to other disciplines and grade

levels, and the role of understanding processes of students’ learning in improving teaching practice.

Because of the importance in teaching practice of adaptation to problems and resources that emerge

in activity, it is likely that much of the professional learning that is needed depends on practical

experience at work. Research should thus investigate how the structure of teachers’ work supports or

hinders their “on-the-job” learning, and what kinds of abilities are learned in particular situations that can

transfer to other settings with different circumstances, including teaching students with different cultural,

ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics from those in which the teacher has been working.

Understanding and Supporting Successful Professional Development. Recognizing teaching as

a complex practice requires understanding teachers’ development as professional learning and

understanding teaching as a learning profession. Changes in teaching practice require opportunities for

teachers to practice their profession responsibly, including opportunities to improve it individually and

collectively. The practitioner’s active role in adapting knowledge and skills to circumstances is

particularly important for teaching students who have been historically underserved by our schools.

The needed research would develop an understanding well beyond the current conventional wisdom

about the requirements of teacher learning. Significant changes in professional teaching practice involve a

dynamic reconfiguring of how the individual teacher perceives him- or herself in relation to a community

of practice. This idea has not much affected how we think about research on what teachers need to

know or on their opportunities to learn. The currently prevalent simple model of learning how to teach—

the knowledge goes in during teacher education or professional development and then comes out to be

used in the teachers’ own classrooms—does not account for the engagement of teachers themselves in

improving the practice of their profession. Such assumptions about learning are at odds with what we

know about learning in any professional practice.

Research concerning teachers’ learning needs to recognize that what teachers need to learn to put

reforms in place is not separable from their actual teaching practices or from the developmental

trajectories of their careers. Research needs to examine ways in which people of diverse cultural, ethnic,

and socioeconomic backgrounds are attracted to careers in teaching and how professional development

resources can help increase and maintain diversity in the teaching profession while continuing to improve

practice.
Further research on teachers’ communities of practice is needed, building on findings that norms of

responsibility and collegial efforts at professional problem solving are the most critical factors in the

improvement of teaching and learning. Important lessons can be learned from comparative studies of

learning to teach in different societies, which have already shown that teachers’ work and their

professional cultures can support valuable learning in professional practice.
I. INTRODUCTION

America’s system of public education is vital to our nation’s commitment to equal opportunity.

Every family should have the right to expect that its children will have a fair chance to develop the

abilities they need to participate fully in the social, economic, political, and cultural richness of our

society. This noble goal has not yet been fully achieved, however, and we must find ways to improve

our educational system to provide more equal opportunities for learning to all of our young people.

The National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board takes up this challenge by adopting

high achievement for all students as the focus of its research agenda. To help formulate specific aims

and directions for research programs, the Board asked the National Academy of Education to conduct

a year-long study to result in “a series of focused research questions that can guide the education

research agenda.” Ann Brown and James Greeno agreed to serve as Co-Principal Investigators. In

negotiation with Board personnel, we developed a plan that included three study panels, on

• Strengthening research contributions to educational improvement

• Critical transitions in learning and development

• Teaching, teachers’ professional development, and professional communities of teachers

The Co-Principal Investigators recruited three distinguished researchers, all members of the

National Academy of Education, to chair the panels, and these, with the Co-PIs, selected and recruited

the distinguished researchers and practitioners who served as members of the panels and consultants to

them. Each of the panels held three meetings in which they developed drafts of the panel reports that are

the main body of this document. The panels also received very helpful substantive input from

practitioners. A focus group meeting was held by the panel on critical transitions, written reactions to a

written summary were obtained by the panel on teachers’ development, and practitioners contributed as

regular panel members and consultants to all three of the panels, especially the panel on strengthening

research capacity. A preliminary report was presented to the Board at its September meeting, and one

of the Co-PIs has attended each of the Board’s meetings during the study.

Economic and Democratic Vitality

The Board’s assignment to the NAE study group rests on a fundamental assumption or statement of

value: A vibrant and energetic democracy requires a well-educated and thoughtful citizenry. We believe

that providing an academically challenging curriculum for all students is essential for the maintenance and

preservation of democracy. Students from educationally, economically, and culturally diverse

backgrounds can benefit from assembling together in high-achievement learning environments to develop

common interests, values, and core civic sentiments.
Because students are future workers as well as future citizens, an academically challenging

curriculum for all students will also serve the U.S. economy. The U.S. workplace is increasingly diverse

in race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality. The workplace is also increasingly complex in its intellectual

requirements. Its demands require people to work cooperatively, engage in problem-solving activities,

and communicate the results of their work in written, oral, and graphic formats.

Public schools need to foster the sensibilities and habits of mind that are required for civic life and

productive work among diverse groups of people. These are the larger and fundamentally important

goals that guided the NAE study group’s work concerning improvement of academic achievement in

school.

Some Demographics of U.S. Schools and Communities

Public schools serve an increasingly diverse population. Nationwide, 66% of students in public

elementary and secondary schools are white, 17% are black, 13% are Hispanic, 4% are Asian or

Pacific Islander, and 1% are American Indian/Alaskan Native. This is not the distribution of students

found in large urban school districts, however. Black and Hispanic students together make up more than

half the students in the nation’s central city public schools.

The difficulty public school educators face in trying to teach a diverse population is reflected in

performance measures. Although the gap between the performance of white and black students on the

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics, reading, and science narrowed

in 1994, white students still had higher scores. And although all groups have made gains in the rate of

school graduation over the last 25 years, black and Hispanic students are still more likely than white

students to drop out of school.3 Public schools also face linguistic hurdles with diverse populations.

More than three million school-aged children speak English with difficulty; the vast majority of them are

in large urban school districts.

The quality of schooling for poor students in rural areas also requires attention. The category of

“rural” itself is complex, describing both stationary and migrant farming communities. Schools serving

both stationary and migrant communities have difficulty providing a broad range of study at appropriate

levels. Students from migrant farming families face educational obstacles with regular education

interruptions for their families’ seasonal movement between harvesting sites. They attend multiple

schools in the same year and experience extended periods without instruction during the school year.

Because of high transience rates, both educators and families struggle with records transfer and gradelevel assessment.

Rural and urban poor students share many of the same limitations of curriculum, pedagogy, and

infrastructure. Teachers in poor urban and rural schools have lower qualifications and less teaching

experience than peers in urban and suburban professional neighborhoods. The schools have inadequate
libraries and often lack functional science laboratories. Both poor urban students and rural migrant

students can have high transience rates.

Why the Three Topics of Critical Transitions, Teacher Development, and Research Capacity?

The three topics the Board assigned to NAE are critical issues on which to focus a study of the

magnitude that the Board determined NAE should undertake (additional topics are considered later).

They highlight issues of crucial concern for the education of low-income students: How can research be

organized to contribute most productively to progress toward the goal of high achievement by all

students? What are the principal roadblocks to high achievement, especially for low-income students?

What hinders teachers in developing their abilities to foster high achievement by all students?

A Theme in the Study’s Findings and Recommendations

As the three study panels have done their work and the findings and recommendations of their study

have developed, a general theme has emerged. We recommend it to the Board as a central problem for

its consideration. This theme is that society’s ability to make substantial progress toward the goal of high

achievement for all students is limited by assumptions about the nature of research, learning, and

teaching that cause policy-makers and practitioners to neglect important complexities associated with

education.

America’s system of education is remarkably successful in many ways, contrary to the prevalent

view of its failings.4 Every day, many children throughout the nation make significant progress toward

academic success. Nevertheless, the society expects much more of its educational system than it is now

getting. We conclude that to rise to the level of these expectations, we must develop more complex

understandings of learning, teaching, and research.

The common assumptions we challenge consider researchers’ investigations, students’ learning, and

teachers’ development in isolation from larger contexts. Regarding research, it is usually assumed that

the results of researchers’ investigations should have important practical implications, whether or not the

researchers are trying to improve educational effectiveness. Regarding students’ learning, students are

usually assumed to learn procedures and facts independently of their comprehension of the concepts

and principles that make them understandable, and students’ learning in school is assumed to occur

independently of their abilities and personal identities outside of school. Teachers are assumed to

develop skills and subject-matter knowledge independently of the social and cognitive challenges they

deal with in their classrooms as they interact with students. We believe that the relations among all these

factors must be better understood, and to do so we must think of education as a complex professional

undertaking.

Of course, academics have a reputation for saying that things are complicated, and our emphasis on

the need for more complicated assumptions about learning, teaching, and research fits that pattern. But
we want to make it clear that our concern in this report goes beyond our intellectual appreciation of the

inherent complexity of the things we study. Policies and practices based on simplistic assumptions

cannot be as effective as they need to be to serve the nation’s children. We believe that our society is

seriously committed to high educational achievement for all of our students. And we conclude from our

work in this study that to progress further toward that goal, we need to revise some basic assumptions

about the nature of learning, teaching, and research and make them truer to their inherent complexity.

The usual assumptions about learning, teaching, and research are approximations that perpetuate

practices that are only partially successful. Our educational system works well for some of our children,

but its failures are disproportionately among children of low-income backgrounds. These inequities are

the reason that the Board adopted the agenda of high achievement by all students.

First, consider educational research and its influence on educational improvement. Much of our

nation’s educational research and improvement is organized by the “pipeline” assumption that

researchers produce knowledge about general principles, program developers apply that knowledge in

the design of instructional materials and programs, and local educational professionals implement those

programs. Contributions of this kind of research to educational practice have been substantial, but the

productivity of research for practical improvements based on this assumption has been limited, partly

owing to problems of translation between the various communities of people who do the work of

research, development, and implementation in educational practice. A more accurate perspective would

view production of knowledge and understanding, and accomplishment of educational improvement, as

aspects of a single process, in which specialists in research, specialists in program or materials

development, and specialists in educational practice all have essential contributions to make. This more

complicated assumption can be the basis for organizing collaborative projects of problem-solving

research and development. Researchers, program developers, and professional educators can share

responsibility and accountability for making a positive difference in the effectiveness of a particular

school. Jointly they can develop materials that support the transport of ideas and methods to other sites

and that contribute to the advancement of knowledge and understanding of fundamental principles in the

research literature.

Next, consider learning. Within the curriculum, the assumption that learning is simply a linear

progression through a set of skills leads to locating students along a single dimension of achievement that

corresponds to “normal” progress at an age level. Separate tracks are created for students who have

progressed more quickly or slowly than others along the trajectory. This simple linear assumption

overlooks complexities involving transitions that require students to develop more general capabilities—

for example, in reading, to develop different forms of linguistic activity, and in mathematics, to develop

different systems of concepts and forms of representation and reasoning. These requirements for

academic progress are often implicit and therefore are differentially harmful to low-income students,

whose resources outside of school are less closely matched with the habits and interests that schools
implicitly require. To support significant progress beyond the level of success our schools can now

achieve, school instruction needs to recognize more realistically the multifaceted nature of school

achievement and to confront the multiplicity of academic needs of low-income students instead of simply

labeling them deficient.

The problem of academic achievement is often treated as though it involves only the activities of

students in school. This view ignores relations between those activities and what happens outside of

school. Research that has examined non-school activities of low-income students has revealed

significant intellectual abilities that could be taken into account in school learning, to the benefit of those

students and quite possibly of all students. The assumption that school learning is self-contained neglects

these abilities and contributes to the impression that low-income students lack the competencies that are

required for high achievement in school. A more realistic understanding that recognizes the complicated

relationships between the abilities needed in school and the abilities that students develop outside of

school could support significantly greater engagement and achievement. This more realistic assumption

treats school in relation to its larger context.

To be sure, we are fundamentally concerned with what happens within the institution of schooling.

We also recognize that the ways in which society (and the research community) divides up education

create artificial boundaries between institutions. As a consequence, we often get false impressions of

students’ lives. The lives of educators and students in schools are influenced by the actions of people in

the family, at work, in government offices, and in community organizations.

Finally, consider the teaching and learning that teachers need to accomplish to be effective,

especially with low-income students. Much discussion of teachers’ learning focuses on “training”, in

which teachers acquire a set of skills and knowledge that is assumed to be sufficient for them to teach

well. This assumption of skill and knowledge acquisition is unrealistic. Successful teaching involves

flexibility, invention, and the ability to respond to challenges and problems that emerge in moment-tomoment interactions with students in classrooms. Many teachers have developed these abilities through

the learning that occurs in their work experience and interactions with colleagues, but important aspects

of successful teaching are left out of most professional development programs. More realistic (and more

complicated) assumptions about the nature of teachers’ work and about their careers could support the

development of resources and programs for teachers’ learning and professional development, both in

their regular work and in off-site learning activities, that would help many more of them move closer to

the goal of high achievement for all students.

Some Issues For Future Study

In submitting this report, we are aware that the topics of our study do not include all of the important

issues facing American education. We mention three important topics here, which overlap with concerns

of the panels in this study but would provide foci for research somewhat different from those discussed
in this report. We recommend these to the Board as topics for future study in its consideration of

research priorities.

Assessment. The Board indicated in its initial communication about this study that development of

improved knowledge and technology for educational assessment was of interest; however, this topic

had to be deferred because of limited resources.

“Accountability” is an increasingly important issue in educational research and practice. Current

accountability measures, however, do not match the goals of most educational reforms for low-income

students, especially those reforms aimed at improving their complex thinking and participation in

activities of inquiry and sense-making.5

One issue to be considered is the limitations of norm-referenced tests that are conventionally

presented in standardized, multiple-choice formats. Criterion-referenced measures, aligned with teaching

and learning standards, may assess the competence of low-income students more productively than

norm-referenced tests.6 Alternative methods that are responsive and valid for guiding the instruction of

low-income students should be developed and studied.

Learning Environments and Educational Technology. Reforms to help all students achieve high

standards include enriching the learning environment within schools. It should be no surprise that the

mere presence of computational technology does not guarantee educational benefits. Like any

technology, its effects depend on its use. A productive method of research that has been called design

experiments7 includes development of technological resources, learning activities, and teaching

practices combined with research that advances scientific understanding of learning and teaching to

improve the design of resources and practices. (We discuss the need for research and improvement of

this kind in more detail in section II.) The President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and

Technology recommended a strong program of research and development to advance the productive

use of technology in American education.8 The recommendations in that report were quite general, and

it would be valuable to develop a more concrete agenda of research and development, especially

regarding educational benefits for low-income children and regarding productive ways in which teachers

can develop their capabilities for using technology-rich learning environments.

Cultural and Political Contexts of Schooling, Educational Policy, and School Finance.

Schools do not function independently from the cultural, political, and economic structure of American

society. Teachers and administrators in schools with high concentrations of low-income students face

overwhelming practical problems. They often have to feed their students before school, talk to socialservice agents and probation officers on their lunch hour, arrange for basic health care and child care

after school, and send educational materials to homes without pens, pencils, and books. When the

school district is also a port of entry for immigrants speaking many different languages, these teachers
and administrators also have to serve as cultural mediators between families and social agencies, banks,

landlords, and employers. In these circumstances both parents and educators have to invent and

maintain complex survival strategies, leaving them with little time for the children’s education.

If changes in schooling are to be significant and lasting, they must be supported with resources and

understanding in the society at large. For example, regarding topics discussed in this report, although the

scientific issues of learning to read and learning mathematics are relatively settled in the research

community, they are far from settled in public debate, and it is not clear whether or how the society will

use the information and insight developed through research. It could be especially important—and

challenging—to understand ways in which public support for public education is changing as the society

undergoes its current phase of diversification. Studies of the formulation of educational policy and

decisions about funding would examine important questions about constraints and opportunities for

educational change, as would studies of whether and how policies promulgated in state or federal

education agencies actually affect educational practice.

Although not explicitly addressed in this report, we also believe that there are important issues

related to education policy and school finance that should be part of an ongoing research agenda. Policy

research focuses on how policies get translated into practice at the school and classroom level. Policy

research today analyzes how policies can support instructional improvement, i.e., how the structural,

organizational, managerial, fiscal and larger policy context can support good instruction and improved

student learning. As research on learning produces more findings, design interventions building on that

research will need to be created. Those interventions will need to be tested and, as importantly, their

organizational, fiscal-resource, managerial, staffing and instructional support aspects will need to be

understood.

Past research on education policy identified its fragmented and non-coherent character and helped

to spur the current standards-based education and now comprehensive school reform movements.

Other policy research has helped educators understand how and why policies do or do not get

implemented, how to design effective decentralization and deregulation policies, and why policies need

simultaneously to address capacity development within an accountability, incentives and rewards

framework. Though initially concerned with fiscal equity, school finance policy and research is now

focusing on issues of educational adequacy and its cost, how to improve educational productivity, and

how to reallocate the current and relatively high levels of educational resources to more effective uses.

Newer policy research has also stimulated a growing national conversation about how to change the

structure of teacher compensation, to pay more for teacher professional expertise as well as to provide

bonuses to all in schools that improve student performance. Finally, policy research has raised

fundamental questions about current educational governance structures, with recommendations for

governance changes that range from mayoral takeover, to eliminating school boards, to charters and

vouchers—all of which are being tried and need solid research assessment.
II. STRENGTHENING RESEARCH CAPACITY

FOR IMPROVING EDUCATION

II.1. The Panel’s Mission

The Panel on Strengthening the Capacity of the Research System was charged with recommending

how OERI could strengthen research capacity for contributing to educational practice and public policy.

This broad charge reflects dissatisfaction by practitioners, policy makers, and researchers alike with the

historical and current relationship between research and practice.9 Many practitioners and policy

makers believe that researchers talk mainly to each other and fail to tackle some of the most important

and pressing problems of education. Researchers, for their part, often feel that relevant research is

ignored when important educational decisions are made, and they wonder how they can effectively enter

the public conversation about educational ends and means.

Although they may differ about why this situation exists, both sides agree that the nation is, at the

very least, failing to benefit fully from the investment it makes in education research. Both are also

searching for ways to improve the situation, recognizing that we are likely to need more than just more

numerous and better “dissemination” efforts to convey the results of research to potential users.

The need for a more effective system to link research with practice and policy derives directly from

the scope and magnitude of the education problems we are seeking to solve. Much higher levels of

literacy and scientific and mathematical competence will be needed in the next century than we have

today. What is more, these new levels of competence will be needed by our whole population, not by

just a few who have been selected as future leaders of society.10 The education system broadly

construed (including informal as well as formal educational institutions and encompassing multiple forms

of institutional and interpersonal organizations) needs to reinvent itself around powerful pedagogies and

new forms of organization that make it possible for educators to teach effectively and for all of our

diverse students to learn core concepts and knowledge along with the basic skills and capacities for

thinking and reasoning they will need in the course of their lives.

Expectations for much higher achievement than American schools have known in the past are

embodied in the standards now adopted in virtually every state.11 Accompanied in some states by new

forms of testing and accountability, the standards movement is creating a sense of moral urgency

surrounding education reform. Large problems that have been allowed to develop without adequate

attention are now visible to everyone. Consider a few examples.

Reading and writing. We need to find ways to make sure that every child learns to read during

primary school and to provide effective “catch-up literacy” education for those who need it, including

immigrants and those whom the education system has failed the first time around. We also need to make
sure that Americans’ literacy does not stop with the simple forms of reading that used to be good

enough for most people. People need to know how to write well also, and they need to be able to

understand and analyze complex texts, something only a minority of our students can now do.12 Existing

research directly relevant to this problem is not being fully put to use in our schools,13 even as many

issues related to literacy education are left untouched by research. A new joining of educational research

and practice could make substantial progress toward achieving high levels of reading and writing

competence in our entire population.

Effective learning in urban school districts. America’s urban school districts are struggling.14

Filled with challenging populations of students, including many who have only recently arrived in this

country and others who have been chronically undereducated, urban schools have inherited outdated

systems of organization and, often, a poorly prepared teaching force. There is no shortage of

demonstrably workable ideas for teaching almost any subject or topic in the school program to any of

America’s children. There are multiple examples of whole schools that educate urban students well.15

But making good education in urban school districts the rule rather than an exception that depends on

extraordinary people and exceptions to standard operating procedures is still a problem.16 A sustained

and systematic attack on taking effective forms of teaching “to scale” in urban school districts could

make a real difference in achievement. Such an undertaking—considering questions of organization and

incentives as well as pedagogy and community-school relationships—calls for a new alliance and new

forms of collaboration among practitioners and researchers.

Technology. Technology will be everywhere in our children’s future. People who do not know how

to use it will be isolated from opportunity, and the country as a whole will suffer from missed chances

for economic growth and civic exchange. Furthermore, technology can make the teaching of almost all

school subjects more powerful, although rarely in the simple way we used to imagine—just “delivering

information” more efficiently. The education system may well be the last major sector of our society to

join the technological revolution. That it must join seems beyond doubt. But how to do it well—how to

educate both with and for technology and how to use technology to increase equity rather than widen

current gaps between the “haves” and “have nots”—remains a challenge.17 Anecdotal evidence of

successful technology programs in education abounds; careful analysis of both successes and failures is

far more rare. Meanwhile, large amounts of private money are spent on introducing technology into

education. We might crack the technology problem if researchers and practitioners joined in forms of

research that combined analytic and practical goals and methods.

To address these and other pressing issues facing American education, we recommend that OERI

establish a new program of problem-solving research and development. The program we recommend
calls for new forms of research organization, focused on practice and on engaging researchers and

practitioners together in problem solving and theoretical analysis.

We also recommend selecting segments of the population and topics for study to promote greater

equity. For example, the new program should favor attempts to create mathematics classrooms that

promote student understanding in schools that serve disadvantaged communities over those that try to

do so in elite suburban schools. Similarly, priority should be given to studies focused on topics with

strong links to equity, that is, to studies in core areas that link closely to changing the educational status

of poor children. Examples of these core areas would include early literacy as the foundation of later

learning, and algebra as a gatekeeper to careers in prestigious high-paying fields.

For the present, our proposal should be viewed as an important addition to OERI’s portfolio of

research and dissemination activities rather than as a replacement for current programs. There are

precedents for the kind of problem-solving research we recommend, but many questions remain about

appropriate methods18 and effective forms of organization. In the spirit of joining research and practice,

therefore, we recommend a measured start-up for this new program. A limited number of projects can

be mounted in the beginning, then developed through an iterative process of on-the-ground design and

redevelopment, with careful analysis both by participants and by the broader educational research and

practice community. Expansion of the program can then be based on solid experience in managing

forms of research and development that are focused directly on solving problems of educational practice

and public policy.

We believe this method will require grappling with some of the most persistent and deeply ingrained

problems of our day: for example, getting all students to read by the third grade; effectively remediating

reading problems that persist into the middle and high schools; successfully integrating technology into

teaching and learning; and improving the quality of instruction in urban school districts. It will mean

tackling problems that have social as well as academic roots, questioning the social arrangements of

schooling (e.g., tracking), and taking seriously the charge to create good citizens as well as an educated

workforce.

II.2. Models for Research and Practice

Historically, the relation between research and practice in education has been troubled.19 The field

of education does not have a strong, well-established professional community that takes as its charge

the design and development of practice-relevant theory, products, and procedures based on established

scientific principles and data. There are important examples of such design and development work, but

it does not occupy a sufficiently stable and extensive community of researchers and developers. The

field does not include a sufficiently established institutional home, form of professional identity, or set of
incentive structures that can be called on to support sustained attention to a continuing, integrated set of

activities aimed at solving pressing educational problems and developing sound educational theory.

Worst of all, education lacks a well established tradition of mutual accountability between education

research and practice. There are examples of collaborations in which researchers and professional

educators join in shared accountability for educational improvement and advancing research, but these

are exceptional. In most cases, researchers are expected to study important educational questions, but

their work is judged almost entirely by its quality as research; the relevance of the work to the details of

education practice is secondary, despite frequent attempts to document some kind of “impact.” On the

other side, knowing research, seeking it out, and acting in accordance with its results (even when these

results challenge some traditional and favored ways of doing things) are exceptional rather than

normative behaviors for working educators. Furthermore, regarding contributions to the research

literature, professional educators are generally viewed, by themselves as well as by researchers, as the

objects of study, rather than as participants in constructing knowledge and understanding general

principles.

This situation is not new. The history of OERI and its predecessors (the National Institute of

Education, the U.S. Office of Education within the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare) is

in part a tale of trying to establish, nurture, and sustain a more productive relationship between

research—the source of a reliable knowledge base for education improvement—and educational

practice. The conceptual basis for much of this work (the Research-Development-DisseminationEvaluation [RDDE] model20), however, embodies a set of assumptions about the way in which research

and practice should interact that we want to question.

In the past, researchers typically have taken responsibility for producing new knowledge that relates

to some aspect of learning, pedagogy, or schooling and for disseminating that knowledge through the

traditional academic venues of scholarly journals and meetings. Others, often education practitioners,

have assumed the responsibility for designing educational products and programs, sometimes based on

research data but more typically based on experience and intuition, in response to specific problems.

Pressures to be pragmatic and move on to the next problem often mean that practitioners devote little

time to analyzing how their programs work or how they may be useful in other settings.

There is a second dimension of the research-practice “disconnect”—the gap between what we

know and what we do with what we know. No matter how we conduct our research—through surveys

or ethnographic methods or “design experiments”—we need to develop better strategies to ensure that

research findings will have a wider impact in schools and communities with significant numbers of lowincome students. For the most part, we have treated the intersection of research and practice as one in

which researchers transmit the products of research to practitioners. This situation is ironic, for we know

that the transmission model does not work for the education of children. Why, then, do we think it

should work for the education of practitioners?
The RDDE approach to research and practice has proven to be unproductive and myopic. When

researchers take little or no responsibility for making things work and practitioners eschew the

development of explanatory systems for how and why things work or not, neither research nor practice

benefits. Without a sense of mutual obligation to one another, researchers and practitioners continue in

their own worlds, talking past rather than to one another.

An Alternative to RDDE

Despite these limits, RDDE (so named or not) has persisted as the main conceptual basis of our

research and improvement system. This is partly because no plausible alternative to the present

relationship between research and practice in education has been available. Now, research in the history

of science and technology provides a basis for a new framework for thinking about research. Donald

Stokes21 has suggested that the relation between a science and its societally useful applications is best

thought of not as varying along a single basic-applied dimension but rather in two dimensions: degree of

attention to formulating general principles and degree of attention to use. A research program can be

either high or low along each dimension. So in contrast to current stereotypes, research can be high in

use orientation without thereby being low in principles orientation. Stokes's conception, then, provides a

framework for thinking about research that is simultaneously basic and applied.

Stokes illustrated the four quadrants he created by crossing the two dimensions with prototypes of

historically important research programs (see figure 1). His example of the high use/high principles

quadrant was Pasteur, whose career was strongly concerned with both changing medical practice,

including developing methods of vaccination and sterilization in surgery, and understanding basic

biological mechanisms, which included basic research to study how microorganisms transmit disease

and cause fermentation and to demonstrate that microorganisms are present in the atmosphere. By

contrast, as Stokes noted, Thomas Edison focused on use-oriented invention in his development of

commercially profitable electric lighting, with little concern for developing general principles, whereas

Niels Bohr focused on principles of physics in his development of a model of atomic structure, leaving

questions of use and application to others.
Research is inspired by:

considerations of use?

Quest for 

fundamental 

understanding?

pure basic 

research 

(Bohr)

use-inspired 

basic research 

(Pasteur)

pure applied 

research 

(Edison)

no yes

no

yes

Figure 1. Quadrant model of scientific research.22

We believe that OERI should continue funding basic and applied research, but at the same time we

recommend that it establish a new program of research and development in “Pasteur’s Quadrant.” This

new program would be based on a model of research and communication that assumes that much useful

knowledge about education practice must be jointly constructed by researchers and practitioners.

This research should be focused explicitly on solving specific current problems of practice and at

the same time should be accountable for developing and testing general principles of education that

advance fundamental understanding and can be expected to apply broadly beyond the particular places

in which the research is done. We believe this can be best accomplished through specially organized

forms of Problem-Solving Research and Development (a version of what Stokes called “use-inspired

basic research”), a concept that we elaborate presently. At the end of section II, we discuss ideas for

OERI’s appropriate role in sponsoring research in the other quadrants identified in figure 1. We also

discuss how our proposals might affect thinking about OERI-sponsored institutions such as research

centers and regional laboratories. The bulk of section II, however, is devoted to explicating the concept

of Problem-Solving Research and Development and the ways in which OERI might build the targeted

federations of researchers and practitioners that, over a five- to ten-year period, can be expected to

build a strong new capacity in the U.S. for education research that will be both useful and principled and

that can provide a practical grounding for meeting the high learning goals for all of our children to which

the nation is now committing itself.

II.3. Problem-Solving Research and Development

In the course of its deliberations, the panel sought out and analyzed existing research and

development programs in education that could help specify some important characteristics of work in

Pasteur’s quadrant: that is, research that would improve education practice and results in the short and
medium term and at the same time build an expanding set of principles for education’s future. The panel

found a number of examples of projects and programs that engage researchers and practitioners in

complex forms of research and development and that appear to be yielding knowledge likely to be of

use beyond the local settings in which the work is proceeding. They range in scope from research on

entire school districts’ reform efforts, to the design of innovative curricula, to fundamentally different

social arrangements for learning in classrooms, to research on individual schools or specific subpopulations of American students. They engage researchers from multiple disciplines. Much of this

research is focused on instruction, learning, and social organization of schooling for the nation’s

increasingly diverse population of school children.

 From these examples, the panel developed a definition of Problem-Solving Research and

Development that captures several essential features:

1. Commitment to the Improvement of Complex Systems

This work is not meant to solve narrow-bore problems whose remedies create isolated islands of

excellence. Rather, participants will take on broad-based problems that are widely regarded as

critical and real for education and, therefore, necessarily embedded in complex systems. The

problems and their solutions will be deeply rooted in issues of teaching and learning within the

complicated organizational structures of districts, schools, and classrooms. Participants express their

commitment to improved practice and outcomes through their unwavering focus on and acceptance

of responsibility for the influence of their work on what students learn and how the particular

educational systems in which they are working function.

2. Co-Development by Researchers and Practitioners, with Recognition of Differences in Expertise and

Authority

Researchers and practitioners work together to frame the problem and its solution. Together, they

identify the features and boundaries of the problem space; decide what additional information needs

to be gathered or analyzed in order to understand the problem more fully; and develop tools,

approaches, and expertise to solve the problem. As they work together, researchers and

practitioners develop a common vision and a shared language. At the same time, they retain and

respect the unique forms of expertise and domains of authority that each brings to the table. For

example, when decisions on aspects of practice must be made, researchers are actively consulted,

but practitioners’ judgments are accorded greater weight. Similarly, practitioners are active in

formulating questions and interpretations of data, but when decisions about methodology or other

technical matters must be made, researchers’ judgments are accorded greater weight.

3. Long-Term Engagement that Involves Continual Refinement
The intensive interaction between practice-based activity and research that we envisage demands a

stable set of professional relationships among participants who are committed to using data and

evidence to critique and progressively refine their emerging designs and understandings. The

improvements we seek will be based upon constructing designs, testing them, revising them, and

retesting them in continuing refinement. Such work does not occur in a vacuum, but rather emerges

from consistent interactions among a steady group of participants over a long period, during which

mutual trust and respect gradually develop.

4. Commitment to Theory and Explanation

Simply solving a local problem is not enough to qualify as Problem-Solving Research and

Development. In addition to creating education programs and redesigning education systems, these

kinds of projects will develop articulate explanations regarding how and why things do or do not

work. Participants view themselves as accountable for generating and testing general principles as

well as for producing theories and explanations that ensure that the work done in one site

contributes to fundamental knowledge and understanding and is of broad use to the field. This

commitment to principled explanation is an obligation of all team members, both practitioners and

researchers.

Among the array of existing research and development programs we reviewed, the panel found

excellent examples of each of the features above, although few, if any, programs displayed all of them.

All the projects that served as examples for the panel’s deliberations took on complex and broad

educational problems in ways that recognized a problem’s interdependence with the cultures of schools

as organizations and the communities that they serve (Feature 1). The foci of the programs included the

development of effective learning environments in urban school districts in Chicago23 and New York

City,24 the design of an early intervention program for first-grade children identified as most at risk of

failure to learn to read,25 the improvement of mathematics instructional programs in urban middle

schools serving disadvantaged communities,26 the development, refinement, and integration of

technologies and inquiry-based curricula to support science learning,27 the design of a school-wide

elementary reading program targeting disadvantaged populations,28 and the development of a videobased macrocontext for complex problem generation and problem solving.29 Although all of the projects

we reviewed developed deep commitments to improving the sites where they were working, the criteria

used to judge success and the consequences of failure varied.

In the examples discussed by the panel, research and development tasks were shared between

researchers and practitioners (Feature 2) in different ways. Co-development ranged from in-depth

conversations leading to the identification of broad areas for investigation and agreed-upon frameworks

for shaping the interpretation of data30 to much more targeted co-development of specific processes and
products (e.g., joint development of curriculum,31 of project-based curricula and supporting

technologies for teaching science,32 and of approaches to teaching middle school mathematics33). The

crucial ingredient of co-development is mutual investment by both the practitioners and the researchers

in the problems under investigation and in ways of framing and attacking those problems. In their joint

enterprise, researchers and practitioners bring different sets of skills to the table. For example, in the

technology-enhanced project (Co-Vis), the researchers brought a vision of project-based pedagogy

and implemented computing and telecommunications infrastructures to support it. The teachers turned

the technological tools and vision into a concrete set of activities, which they anchored onto a coherent

curricular frame that could be passed on to other teachers.

Many of the projects we discussed extended over several years, some over decades. This longterm investment represents commitment to both the people and programs at specific sites and to

continual refinement of solutions to the problems on which they were focused (Feature 3). For example,

KEEP researchers worked in the Kamehameha setting for 10 years continually evaluating and refining

their instructional program.34 The initial development project for Reading Recovery (the early

intervention program for at-risk readers) was followed with a continuing research-and-development

program that included field trials and numerous follow-up studies. Brown and Campione’s project,

Fostering a Communities of Learners,35 developed curricula and classroom activity structures with

teachers and modified the materials and methods in light of their experience over a multi-year period.

Commitment to theory and explanation (Feature 4), when present, has taken several forms. Some

projects have been more focused on the production of tools, defined processes, and other forms of

conceptual scaffolding that will help others in comparable situations who are attempting similar reforms.

Many of Success-for-All’s contributions, for example, have come in the production of curricular tools

along with the explication of system-building supports that must be present in order to ensure success

(e.g., 80% of the teachers must agree to implement the program, tutors are necessary for the earliest

grades, full-time facilitators and a family support team are essential). In a somewhat different, but related

vein, the research protocols and frameworks used during the QUASAR project have been developed

into professional development materials and forms of conceptual scaffolding for others attempting

middle-school mathematics reform.36

Contributions to theory and basic knowledge were somewhat more difficult to find, although KEEP

is a stellar example in this regard. The ten years of the Kamehameha laboratory-and-demonstration

school’s existence coincided with a time of significant research on language development and literacy

learning—research that the KEEP researchers and educators both drew from and contributed to. Of

particular interest to the R&D team were studies comparing the ways children and teachers interact in

instructional settings with the ways those same children interact with adults and other children at home

and in the larger community. Such studies highlighted the interwoven nature of social interaction,

language development, and achievement of literacy, and they suggested that a child’s literacy is speeded
by instructional interactions that are compatible with the child’s natal culture. This work has made longlasting contributions by debunking deficit notions of minority populations; by highlighting that effective

literacy teaching requires attention from all levels of the organization, from student-teacher interactions to

administrative structures and functions; and by offering a rich model for teacher preparation and

professional development.

II.4. Ensuring Usefulness Beyond the Research Site

Problem-Solving Research and Development of the type we advocate calls for intensive work at

one site or a small number of related sites. Only by working in an intensive way can the commitment to

improving practice and outcomes in a functioning education system be realized. Because of this local

commitment, there must be planned, systematic attention to “what travels” from a Problem-Solving

R&D site to other sites. OERI will need to build into its programs expectations and support mechanisms

to encourage local problem-solving teams to look beyond their immediate situations.

Education solutions do not travel with ease.37 A program or process that functions well at an original

development site can rarely be disseminated by simply describing the process and expecting others to

replicate it. These difficulties with replication occur partly because description alone rarely conveys

enough detail to permit faithful re-enactment. People interpret innovations through the lens of what they

already know.38 Without a firm and deep understanding of the principles that underlie the innovation,

their local adaptations will frequently be misguided. Difficulties with replication are also partly due to

variability across education sites (variability in student population, staff capabilities, organization, and

political context); therefore, successfully using ideas and processes developed elsewhere almost always

requires adaptation and re-implementation or re-design to some degree. Even highly structured

curriculum materials—which might compare, for example, with prescribed drugs for specific medical

conditions—require local learning and a significant degree of local adaptation to function effectively once

they move beyond an initial R&D site.

For all these reasons, the panel wants to replace the familiar concept of dissemination of research

and development results with the concept of encouraging travel from site to site. Solutions to complex

problems cannot be encapsulated in journal articles, reports, or boxes of materials. We thereby

advocate moving beyond the simple idea of dissemination to building capacity for broad-scale

improvement. Such capacity will typically involve simultaneous developments along three dimensions:

• well-articulated ideas and principles—the theories and explanations that lie behind the solutions

worked out at specific R&D sites

• tools and defined processes that can help people use ideas and programs in new places

• people who are very familiar with the principles and practices developed at an R&D site and who

are able to assist schools or districts wanting to use solutions based on the original R&D work.
Ideas and Principles

A first responsibility of Problem-Solving R&D teams is to attend to the problems identified at a site

and to develop solutions that work there. But, as we have noted, solutions that work in one place can

rarely be simply adopted in another. Almost invariably, new sites adopting a research-based practice

will also need to adapt it to fit local conditions. The resulting variations in a practice, sometimes

apparently small and unimportant, may turn out to violate important aspects of the practice as it was

designed and studied at the original development site. Thus the adopted practice may fail at the new site.

One important way to make designed practices more robust as they spread to new implementation

sites is to make the principles underlying the design explicit. New users who understand the underlying

principles of an educational practice or program will be able to move beyond simply copying its surface

features. They will be better able to craft a local implementation that honors the underlying principles of

the designed practice; that is, they will be more likely to avoid modifications that in fact vitiate its

effectiveness. At the same time, their understanding of the underlying principles of a research-based

practice will free them to develop new variations that may turn out to be even more powerful than the

original model.

Primarily because of the power of well-articulated principles to both constrain and empower

effective new implementations, we have stressed the need for local problem-solving teams to be

committed to the development of theories and explanations for their solutions as well as to finding

solutions that work locally. In Subsection II.5, we suggest how the linking of problem-solving sites in

specially designed “hub and spokes” R&D confederations may contribute to the more powerful

development of principled explanations and theories.

Tools and defined processes

Another way to facilitate the travel of education solutions from site to site is to construct tools and

defined processes of engagement. Research in the Vygotskian tradition,39 along with historical, social

science, and behavioral research on the functioning of various professional communities,40 has made it

increasingly clear that tools, especially those that help us observe and measure phenomena, embody

theories of what ought to be taught or learned, how people learn, how professional groups ought to

function, and what is important about community attitudes. Tools—including student assessments,

curriculum and professional development materials, software programs, questionnaires for probing

community attitudes, and protocols for observing classrooms or professional meetings—are powerful

carriers of theory and knowledge. Carefully designed tools that educators find useful in their practice

can, then, become a powerful means of changing educational practice. Similarly, defined processes for

such activities as conducting school visits, organizing professional development opportunities, or

supervising school principals are de facto representations of what an educational idea would look like in

practice. Such defined processes can, therefore, help to support new implementers of a research-based
design to act in accord with the principles and theories underlying the design. Problem-Solving R&D

teams should be strongly encouraged to build and test tools and defined processes that will help their

solutions travel faithfully to other locations.

People

The experience of those who have been involved in Problem- Solving R&D makes it clear that wellarticulated principles and well-designed tools and processes alone will not ensure the successful travel of

their solutions. Virtually everyone working in this field who is committed to seeing his or work spread

beyond the original R&D site has found it necessary to provide some form of technical assistance to

new implementers. This almost always means that people very familiar with the core research and

development will work directly with educators in new implementation sites.

Collaborative work takes many forms. Some R&D projects train significant numbers of students

and technical staff who later move to other sites or to related R&D projects. This movement of

students, post-docs, technicians, and practitioners who have had experience in Problem-Solving R&D

is a major way in which capacity for this form of education research develops and spreads. It works to

the extent that there are new opportunities for Problem-Solving R&D activity around the country, and it

depends on a stable and at least gradually expanding funding stream for such practice-embedded

research. Some projects develop technical assistance teams that are available for consultation at new

sites. An important example of this strategy is provided by Success for All, which, from a practicebased research and development start in a handful of local schools, has developed an extensive network

of schools that have adopted its school design, using structural materials along with a training staff that

supports school staffs. Other projects develop structured seminars and study groups, along with on-site

consultation, to help schools and districts to design and implement programs based on the results of the

research. For example, the Institute for Learning’s partnership and seminar program41 helps transmit to

other districts the research conducted in New York City’s Community District #2.42

Combining Local Problem Solving with a Commitment to Fostering Travel and to Advancing

Knowledge and Understanding of General Principles

Several ways of ensuring understanding and use beyond the Problem-Solving R&D site have

proven utility. The panel noted, however, that many projects meeting most of the criteria laid out in

section II.3 continue functioning for many years without focusing attention on how their results might

become useful beyond the development site. That is, they publish and speak about their work but do

not support it with traveling tools and process supports or develop supporting staff to help would-be

implementers at other sites. Yet another opportunity is often missed as designs travel and begin to get

used at other sites. Much can be learned at this stage that should be subsequently fed back into the

development and travel cycle. Finally, research done at specific sites needs to go beyond outcomes-
based evaluations to the kind of analytical study that is required to contribute to the research literature

that develops knowledge and understanding of general principles.

The NAE study group recommends that OERI establish a funding program in which participating

Problem-Solving R&D projects accept a specific commitment to design their work so that their

solutions and ideas can travel successfully beyond their own research sites and to contribute their

results, analyses, and proposed explanations to the research literature. This implies a considered and

reasonably funded effort not just to find workable solutions but also to generate and publish principled

analyses of the work that can be used by others and considered in the research community. In addition,

at appropriate points in the project’s life, explicit attention would be given to developing tools and

methods that can help other sites adapt the strategies developed by the research team. Projects should

also be expected to develop appropriate forms of “people” support for travel. This could take the form

of partnering with other organizations skilled in technical assistance as well as developing internal

capacity for delivering assistance.

A commitment to designing for travel within OERI’s Problem-Solving R&D program should not

mean that every funded project must throughout its life be designing tools, providing technical assistance,

and contributing to the research literature. Many projects are likely to need a period of time, perhaps

several years, in which their work is primarily invested in their initial research sites. The OERI program

as a whole, however, must treat travel as one of its core commitments, and this implies that, at any given

time, several of OERI’s Problem-Solving R&D projects should be attending to travel and contributing

to understanding of general principles. This will mean, no doubt, that OERI will require all projects to

take on these concerns—either directly or in alliance with other projects—at some time during the

course of their work.

A Special Case: “Going to Scale” as a Problem for Research and Development

It is likely that even requiring all projects to devote some of their human and financial resources to

helping their ideas and solutions to travel will not solve the problem of spreading the results of R&D or

taking promising educational solutions “to scale.” Across the education landscape, many schools and

R&D projects have been demonstrably successful in educating students in a few locations. But it has

proven difficult to spread these practices widely.43 The problem of “going to scale” needs ProblemSolving R&D of its own. Research is needed to understand the occasional cases where strong practices

have spread effectively and, equally, to understand the blockages and constraints that normally inhibit

spread. In the spirit of problem-solving, research teams studying the going to scale problem should also

be designing and testing solutions. In sum, the panel recommends that, within its portfolio of ProblemSolving R&D projects, OERI consider funding one or more projects that are explicitly aimed at studying

and developing solutions to the problems of “going to scale.”
II.5. Linking Problem-Solving Projects for Maximum Capacity Building

We recommend that OERI establish an ambitious new program explicitly designed to link research

and practice. The preceding sections of this report have outlined our conception of Problem-Solving

R&D as a particular form of research that, when combined with continued efforts in both basic research

and applied research and development, is most likely to create solutions to pressing education

problems, well-grounded theories and explanations of educational processes and effects, and the tools

and assistance capacity that can help research-based programs to spread effectively through the

nation’s schools.

In this section and the next we consider how to “bootstrap” what is now at best a modest capacity

for the kind of problem-solving research we are recommending into a robust new R&D capacity.

We have said earlier that we are recommending a portfolio of Problem-Solving R&D projects,

working in multiple sites on different problems and using different theoretical orientations. Diversity

among the projects funded is important as a new form of research capacity is developed, for it is neither

possible, nor wise, to try to predict in advance exactly where the problem-solving breakthroughs will

occur. At the same time, simply creating a collection of projects and leaving to chance the extent to

which they develop synergies and cross-connections—in ideas, in personnel, and in receptive

environments for Problem-Solving R&D—is not likely to enlarge the nation's capacity for linking

research and practice quickly. We therefore considered strategies for deliberately linking research

projects in ways that would enhance both the quality of individual projects and the effectiveness of

OERI’s Problem-Solving R&D program as a whole.

Our proposal for accomplishing this linking is to form federations of Problem-Solving R&D research

projects. Projects with related intentions would be linked in a hub-and-spokes relationship. Each spoke

in a federation would be an independent Problem-Solving R&D project, staffed by senior researchers

and practitioners and funded on the basis of the quality of the concepts, methods, and design strategies

set forth by team leaders. The hub team for each federation, also staffed by senior researchers and

practitioners, would be charged with searching out and articulating issues of common concern across the

sites as well as creating theoretical analyses and tools. These analyses and tools should allow the work

of the spoke teams to cumulate more quickly and more powerfully than if the spoke projects worked

only independently.

A hub team in a Problem-Solving R&D federation will have multiple functions. One very important

function is to enhance the generalizability of the research throughout the federation, supporting theory

development and tool building and perhaps creating clusters of people able to move across research

and new implementation sites. The concept of working across specific projects to find principles and

theories that are general in a field of investigation is not new. The search for generalizations across

particular studies is, in fact, the very foundation of research communities committed to accumulating
knowledge. Many mechanisms (ranging from refereed publication to professional meetings to topical

conferences to meetings of principal investigators) are already in place to support cross-project

accumulation of knowledge and mutual accountability. But the processes currently available are slow

and do not, for the most part, lead to a focus on principled practices and tools usable by practitioners as

well as theories used by the research community itself. We believe that, in the context of the kind of

Problem-Solving Research and Development we are recommending, it is possible to enhance and

accelerate the process of generalization by deliberately charging federation hubs with the task of

cumulation and providing the resources needed to do this job effectively.

Hubs might work in many ways. Convening spoke investigators from time to time for discussions of

planned research and early results can create a distilled and powerful form of “quality control” in the

federation as researchers in the various spokes become accountable to each other for the quality of their

research designs, conclusions, and tools and processes for going to scale. Working in this way, hubs

can be an important counterweight to pressures—created by the demand for spreading research-based

practices quickly—to make claims that are not fully supported by the available evidence.

Hub leaders can also lead in integrating the emerging frameworks and observations from the various

spokes; conducting comparative analyses and forcing attention to conflicting findings or differing

interpretations; and drawing out general principles from local variations. The hub team may also

develop—in concert with spokes representatives—common questions and methods of data collection

that all of the spoke projects agree to address or use. In some cases, it may be useful to think of the

spokes of a federation as a series of ”natural experiments” in redesigning aspects of education practice;

the hub might then draw conclusions across the different experiments composing the federation.

 Hubs can also directly promote ”travel” of the theories and problem solutions created throughout

the federation. Even when problem-solving research teams are actively seeking to generate and test

theory and principles, research in any single site (or even a small collection of sites) will, by its nature,

generate theories and explanations that are in some respects specific to the site. To the extent that this is

so, solutions and principles developed in one site will have difficulty traveling to other sites. To

counteract this tendency, a positive, intentional effort to develop principles that generalize across sites

will be needed. Hub teams might focus especially on usability and going to scale. Hubs might also help

to create the tools, processes, and human resources essential to “travel” of the work conducted at the

spokes.

 We have outlined here some possibilities for how hub-and-spokes federations might function, with

particular attention to the role of the hub. We have focused on the hub functions because this is an

underdeveloped aspect of research and development that we believe needs explicit nurturing in a new

OERI program. But the fact that there are so few examples of successfully functioning problem-solving

hubs means that our proposals are more speculative than they are for spoke R&D teams.
Multiple examples do exist of research ventures in which a central group designs a study that

requires on-the-ground research in multiple sites. Associates at the sites are recruited, but in most

instances agree to follow a centrally designed research protocol. Most of the interpretation, if not the

data analysis, is carried out at the center, with little or no independent role for researchers at the sites.

The hub-and-spokes federations we recommend are not intended to function in this way. The people

leading the spokes’ design teams will need to have both ability and stature that will allow them to

formulate the questions and to work with local constituencies as well as to interact directly with the

broader research and practice communities. But in the federation model, they would also have to agree

to join the hub-and-spokes system understanding that there will be a subset of research and practice

leaders whose job it is to look closely across sites for common issues or problems, and that these

people will have an influence on the federation as a whole.

 We can point to some positive cases of hub-and-spokes research federations of this kind that seem

to be successfully cumulating evidence and creating generalizations that reach beyond individual

projects.44 But at least as many attempts to form hubs appear to have foundered. It would be well to

study these cases as efforts to build more effective hub and spokes federations get under way. Among

the issues to be considered are the optimal kind and degree of compatibility and variation among the

programs at the spokes, the kind of incentives that encourage the cooperation of individuals at each of

the spokes with the hub needs and activities, and the ideal composition of the hub team.

Although there is room to experiment with many specific organizations and functions for hubs in

research federations, OERI will need to invest strongly in the hub function and not leave integration

across sites to chance. This is likely to mean not just investing financially in hubs, but also helping to

launch them and, during the initial years of the Problem-Solving R&D program, tracking successes and

failures and shaping up effective hub-and-spokes federation designs. We say more in Section II.7 about

possible ways OERI might organize to carry out this nurturing and guidance function.

II.6. Incentives and Long-Term Capacity Building

For our recommendations to be carried out successfully, the newly formed federations (hub and

spokes configurations) must be staffed by the highest quality researchers and practitioners. In this

section, we discuss the incentives needed to attract and hold the best and the brightest among both the

researcher and the practitioner ranks.

Researchers

We believe that some researchers will be captivated by the creation of a new social arrangement for

the conduct of educational research: deriving theoretical principles from solving real problems in

education. For researchers eager to work on our most compelling educational problems, the excitement

of working closely with practitioners in schools and classrooms, plus the opportunity to join colleagues
nationally to build generalizable understandings, tools, and insights, will provide ample incentives to

participate. We predict that the people who apply for funding will be among the most forward-looking

and entrepreneurial of their ranks.

Ideally, this new enterprise will build on the wisdom of established senior researchers and capture

the energy and imagination of their junior colleagues. Although senior researchers have job and career

security that will permit exploration of new modes of working, junior researchers will need “protection”

to experiment freely with new or emerging paradigms of what “counts” as educational research. Those

concurrently pursuing tenure in academic departments of universities, for example, may perceive this

work as high-risk. Negotiating entry to the educational system, building trusting relationships, codeveloping frameworks and protocols, and co-interpreting data consume huge amounts of energy and

time. And, because the period from startup to publication of results is typically very long, many

researchers may find it difficult to publish the requisite number of research articles within the time

dictated by tenure and promotion committees. In addition, it is difficult to find outlets for reports of longterm work on complex educational problems, although this may change over the coming years. We

hope that this new research enterprise will encourage a new genre of research report, along with

methodological and ethical criteria by which it should be judged.

 As Problem-Solving Research and Development becomes more widely recognized and funded, we

envision it becoming a practical alternative career path for top-quality researchers. Indeed, if increasing

numbers of promising young researchers to choose the freedom and flexibility of a career path in this

new field, academic departments (especially schools of education) may be challenged to become more

relevant to the concerns of practice or risk losing their best researchers.

Needless to say, the attraction of this kind of work would be greatly enhanced by long-term stability

in the funding stream to support the development of a vigorous field. The OERI could signal its

commitment in other ways as well. For example, it could provide both pre- post-doctoral training grants

as well as distinguished-educator fellowships for people interested in pursuing Problem-Solving

Research and Development. We strongly recommend that OERI take active steps to include scholars of

color in as many of these grants and fellowships as possible. It could also recruit senior, established

researchers with inclinations and experience in this kind of work to advise and spearhead the creation of

the initial hub-and-spoke federations.

Practitioners

We believe that many leading-edge practitioners will be captivated by the idea of working side by

side with researchers to improve their own practice and to derive generalized understandings about how

and why things work, understandings that can help others in different school settings. Like their

researcher counterparts, the practitioners who apply for funding are likely to be in the vanguard of
public education. Nevertheless, to be successful, this new enterprise will also need the cooperation of

rank-and-file educators.

Developing their support may be an uphill battle. For a variety of reasons, including the divergent

theories of action that often divide researchers and practitioners, the politicizing of education by local

communities, and the instability of school administrations, introducing and sustaining innovation in public

educational institutions is difficult. Good working relationships between educational practitioners and

researchers are based on an investment of time in getting to know one another and on deep

understandings of the culture of schooling in general, and the setting of the research in particular. For

practitioners, having outsiders—even friendly advisers—in their school or classroom creates pressures

and spawns anxieties regarding the manner in which and to whom their work will be exposed. Some

teachers may already distrust universities and educational researchers as a result of past experiences in

which they have felt ill-served.

Even when misgivings are not present, the worlds of practice and research, at least as traditionally

conceived, operate under different incentive systems. Practitioners are expected to maintain an orderly,

safe, and instructionally sound environment; typically, they are not rewarded for time and effort put into

discussions with colleagues, personal reflection, or collaborations with professionals who are not

members of their immediate school setting. It may be difficult, therefore, for teachers, principals, and

others to justify the time devoted to Problem-Solving Research and Development.

Time is conceived very differently in the worlds of practice and research. Teachers and other

working educators often need answers for their daily practice faster than researchers are able to provide

them. Another concern for Problem-Solving Research and Development, then, will be balancing the

sense of urgency in most districts/schools to find and implement solutions against the need of researchers

to be thoughtful, well-founded, and reflective.

Despite these disincentives, we believe that many practitioners will choose to participate in

Problem-Solving Research and Development, especially if other conditions are met. First, the work of

the group must be focused on and perceived as making headway in solving a problem with which the

practitioners are deeply concerned. Another incentive for teachers is the resources that frequently

accompany participation in funded projects. Depending on the nature of the work, teachers, principals,

and other professionals might receive computers or other technology, professional journals or books,

instructional materials, money for substitute teachers, travel to professional meetings, university credits,

or a variety of other benefits. Finally, practitioners who participate in this kind of invigorating

professional experience benefit from the "sense of belonging" that comes from becoming a member of a

professional community of practice. Developing a sense of identity as a contributing professional

provides an unparalleled source of motivation and inspiration.

Incentives to Maintaining Research Priorities
Given the deep sense of obligation to educational practice and student learning outcomes that is

likely to develop, and the sense of exhilaration that often accompanies on-the-ground problem solving,

participants may fail to invest the necessary time and energy in research activities. Therefore incentives

for maintaining research priorities must be built into Problem-Solving Research and Development from

the start.

Quality research demands time. Researchers and practitioners must have the opportunity to “touch

base” at several points in the process of initiating, conducting, and interpreting the research. Therefore

time must be set aside for researchers and practitioners jointly to identify topics, frameworks, and

methods; to discuss the progress of data collection; and, finally, to analyze and reflect on emerging

findings. In addition to the provision of joint meeting times, participants would also benefit from

"sabbatical time" built into grants for research and writing activities.

Quality research and development work also demands a delicate balance between freedom and

rigorous standards. Participants must have the flexibility to explore, reflect, and make mid-course

corrections. This will involve making mistakes, recognizing and acknowledging them, resetting goals and

timetables, and, at times, creating alliances with other projects working toward similar ends. The current

manner in which the research and funding communities work—with emphasis on what each funder is

underwriting and expects to have “delivered” under its auspices—works against supporting the longterm collaborative efforts we are recommending.

Even with the kind of freedom we envision as necessary, however, adherence to rigorous standards

of methodology and standards of evidence, ideally created by a community of peers who conduct

similar forms of research, will be needed. Problem-Solving Research and Development projects will

need to build into their work the expectation of peer review and discussion of research results. In

addition, a long-term system of disinterested third-party evaluation and analysis of Problem-Solving

R&D projects and federations will be important to ensure that both the research and the practice goals

of the new program are met.

II.7. Organizing to Commission, Support, and Carry Out

Problem-Solving Research and Development

In earlier parts of this section, we have identified a number of qualities of the Problem-Solving R&D

that we advocate.

• It is motivated by the desire to understand and solve important educational problems;

• It is co-developed by the research and practice communities, but with recognition of differences in

expertise and authority. Joint development includes the definition of the problem, the strategies for

attacking the problem, and the interpretation of the data and findings.
• It involves a long-term commitment toward constructing designs, testing them, revising and refining

them, and retesting them in continuing refinement and improvement.

• It is conceived and carried out with a deep concern for producing principles, theories, materials,

tools, and expertise that will “travel,” as well as contributions to fundamental knowledge and

understanding that will be of broad use to the research community. The central goal of the research

and development is to help practitioners facing similar problems in different settings to attack and

solve those problems.

Who Should Do Problem-Solving Research and Development?

In the immediate future, we do not believe that the OERI program managers should create and fund

institutions. We have not developed a clear vision of what such institutions should look like, and, in any

case, setting up institutions would distract researchers and practitioners from the problem-solving tasks

that we advocate. Some programs we have cited as potential exemplars (e.g., Success for All, the

Institute for Learning, and the Consortium Chicago School Research) had their origins in the academy

and some in OERI’s research centers (e.g., CREDE). As they have evolved, however, several found it

necessary to find or create organizational homes whose mission and incentives more closely parallel their

evolving needs. We have discussed many of the incentive problems above in Section II.6.

Some might argue that the Regional Labs or some research centers are natural homes for the

activities we propose. A hub-and-spokes organization would be desirable for many research centers,

and either class of institution is a potential performer of such work. Nevertheless, we do not believe that

they have an inherent comparative advantage in doing the work. The labs have evolved as organizations

that provide services, mostly in specified geographic regions. Although some have carried out activities

with many of the attributes we have in mind, that is not their specialty. We feel there is general

agreement that the missions and status of the labs have not permitted them to attract significant numbers

of highly qualified researchers.

We feel that rather than create and support institutions, the government should fund projects that

have promise, whatever the primary affiliations of their participants might be. Moreover, it will be

important that the people who do Problem-Solving Research and Development represent the broad

spectrum of researchers and working educators in our country today. As stated in the Introduction, a

concern for diversity and for students at risk sits at the core of our beliefs regarding the kinds of

problems that must be solved. Therefore it will be important to pull in a diversity of talent to serve on

Problem-Solving Research and Development teams, including teachers, professional developers, and

administrators as well as researchers. In order to meld the differing talents and views that we feel are

necessary, the respondents to any solicitation for Problem-Solving Research and Development will

likely be collaboratives of individuals and groups of researchers and practitioners. Experience suggests
that these groupings will likely change significantly over time. In time, a new class of problem-solving

institutions may emerge.

Problem-Solving Research and Development, as we have described it, also involves sustained and

purposeful association of a number of different but related projects. This association should enrich and

extend the activities of the individual projects and result in research and evaluation that lead to broader

forms of understanding and that better inform potential users of the products of the Problem-Solving

R&D effort. Achieving this goal will require assembling teams of researchers and practitioners at

multiple sites and linking sites together in a hub-and-spokes federation. In our judgment, OERI must

organize and manage these activities in ways that differ from recent practice.

As with any new venture, creating a hub-and-spokes model of Problem-Solving Research and

Development will not be without risk. Of prime interest to us is that the field learn from its initial forays

so that improvements and refinements can be made in subsequent rounds of funding and use. The panel

strongly recommends that this initiative be mounted gradually and that significant resources be

committed to continuing study, evaluation, and analysis of the initial set of hub-and-spokes projects that

are funded. These resources should be devoted to increasing our understanding of how the hub-andspokes model contributes to the cumulation of knowledge across sites, as well as to evaluations of

outcomes and processes. A third and final object of study should be the management processes that are

put into place to oversee this initiative, a topic to which we now turn.

Options for Organizing to Support Problem-Solving Research and Development

The proposed hub-and-spokes model described in this proposal will place substantial demands on

program management. The first requirement is that the managers be able to provide a useful definition of

a problem to be attacked and then to refine and publicize the definition of that problem as the research

and development unfolds. The managers must also have the ability and skills necessary to recognize or

to assemble and support effective research-and-development teams. They must be adept at supporting

the sequential decision-making process that must accompany the evolution of a design and its translation

into principles, materials, and skilled staff needed to enlist significant numbers of practitioners. Because

we believe that both the research and the development will be significantly enhanced by the hub-andspokes arrangement, the program managers should be able either to promote collaboration or perhaps

even to perform the functions of a hub themselves. Finally, the managers must be able effectively to

oversee and sustain projects and programs that involve significant funding. The examples of activities

that we have used to guide our deliberations have all involved substantial levels of funding over five or

more years.

Collectively, these requirements call for disciplined flexibility, ability to command the respect of the

performers of the research and development, and leadership that fosters the type of team-based

research and development we have described. The canons of research, practice, or assistance cannot
completely dominate an effort, yet each project must be encouraged to move steadily toward useful

findings, products, and services. Such movement usually requires encouragement and even pressure

from outside the R&D project team. This is an important role for the program office.

Given the demands associated with overseeing this type of research and development, OERI will

want to give considerable attention to deciding where to house the management of this new initiative. An

argument can be made for commissioning, supporting, and carrying out this work in an institution that is

outside the government. The procedural requirements that have evolved within governmental agencies to

assure fairness limit the flexibility and decision making of program officials. Political pressures favor

evenhanded and equal treatment, and the procedural difficulty in changing the direction of a program

deters many government officials from even trying. These problems are inherent in any government

bureaucracy. We propose, instead, contracting with a firm or institution to manage this initiative. The

New American Schools Development Corporation is an example of the kind of firm we are thinking of,

although it has not emphasized research to the degree we envision. We can also imagine creating a

public corporation that is directly accountable to Congress and that carries out the classes of activities

we propose.

We see several advantages to such arrangements. Such an institution would have management

flexibility that is difficult to achieve in a bureaucracy governed by many pages of rules and regulations

that have accumulated over the years. It could adapt its procedures to the needs of the Problem-Solving

Research and Development programs themselves rather than forcing the programs to adjust to the

department's procedures. It might be able to attract a caliber of staff that is hard to attract to

government. It would not be as rigidly bound by the need to commit funding to grants or contracts in

accordance with the government’s fiscal year. The organization might actively seek to engage

foundations in support of this work. It is possible that such an organization could develop the ability to

perform some of the functions we have associated with the hub in earlier sections.

Against these benefits, one can array a number of potential problems. Most important, perhaps is

the challenge of building in appropriate accountability for the expenditure of public funds. In addition,

creating or fostering the evolution of a new institution would require significant effort. And contracting

out the management of an exciting program such as we envision could make it difficult to attract high

quality staff to OERI.

If the initiative is housed with OERI, the panel believes that the management responsibility for

competitions and monitoring of Problem-Solving Research and Development efforts should be located

at the highest possible bureaucratic level, with strong collaborative participation by members of the

research and practitioner communities. We would prefer to see a program management office in the

office of the Assistant Secretary for OERI and reporting directly to him. This organizational structure

would allow the Assistant Secretary to exercise continuing direct oversight and, more important, to

encourage the sort of flexibility and risk taking that this enterprise requires. The location of all the
individual projects in a single program office would also contribute to developing the hub-and-spoke

arrangement we advocate.

An alternative would be to locate the leadership of a hub-and-spokes activity in the OERI institute

whose mission most clearly encompasses the problem addressed by the program. The advantage of

such a location is that the programs might benefit from association with the research and development

being carried out in other parts of the institute. There are a number of disadvantages, however, including

the likelihood that many problem-solving efforts will cross the boundaries of the existing institutes and

that the effort will be less able to attract the outstanding leaders and top-level support we feel it needs.

We would strongly oppose distributing individual projects (spokes) among the institutes and other

organizational units in OERI. Not only would this structure lead to uneven direction, but it would also

severely inhibit the collaboration we see as having great benefits in a hub-and-spokes design.

The panel did not study this management issue sufficiently to make a firm recommendation regarding

the appropriate way in which to organize this effort. Nevertheless, our proposals require that important

parts of the research community modify their traditional behaviors and incentives. Surely they would

require the same of the government.

II.8. Relations with Research in the Basic and Applied Quadrants

We repeat that the NAE study group is not recommending that the activities we are calling

Problem-Solving Research and Development should replace OERI’s support for more traditional basic

research to advance fundamental understanding of educational principles or applied research and

development to improve educational resources and practices. Rather, this new direction of OERIsupported activity should be developed so that it is integrally connected to the more traditional activities

of research and improvement. In Stokes’s two-dimensional model, the conceptual basis for our

recommendations, Problem-Solving Research and Development (which he called use-inspired basic

research) is not a self-contained enterprise, carried out by a community separated from other

communities of researchers and practitioners. As his diagram (figure 1 of the Executive Summary)

indicates, use-inspired basic research contributes both to advances in fundamental understanding and to

improved technologies and practices. It contributes to advances in fundamental understanding in

conjunction with basic research, and it contributes to advances in technologies and practices in

conjunction with applied research and development.

The contribution of Problem-Solving R&D to general explanatory principles should interact

integrally with research conducted in the traditional research disciplines of the behavioral and social

sciences, as well as with research on basic processes that is conducted in the field of education. We

should strive to discover and formulate fundamental principles of learning, cognition, and social

interaction that are as general and coherent as possible, so that the society’s understanding of
educational practices and its debates about alternative policies are based on sound and valid principles.

We should apply concepts and principles developed in basic research that can suggest ways of

approaching problems, and we should evaluate those concepts and principles in the light of experience

in using them. Problems and questions that arise in Problem-Solving R&D should also be pursued in

basic research, which may need to be conducted outside the settings of practical problem-solving.

Problem-Solving R&D also needs to interact integrally with what Stokes called Pure Applied

Research, that is, with efforts that are aimed primarily at improving the effectiveness of educational

systems. Indeed, this interaction is at the core of issues of “travel” that we discuss in Section II.4. The

ideas and principles, the tools and defined processes, and the kinds of people that are developed to

assist people in sites beyond those in the Problem-Solving R&D activities all embody the understandings

that are achieved in those projects. They all need to be evaluated and understood in order to improve

the effectiveness and utility of the programs and to feed back into the design of further Problem-Solving

R&D.
III. CRITICAL TRANSITIONS IN THE LIVES OF LOW-INCOME STUDENTS

III.1. Background

All students make critical transitions as they move from family to school, from elementary to middle

school to high school to college, and from school to work. They advance in knowledge, skills, and

understanding of concepts and methods in the subject-matter domains of the school curriculum. Other

important transitions involve changes in the ways children participate in social practices that are required

for them to be legitimate and productive members of their classroom and school communities. Both of

these aspects of transition are especially critical in the lives of low-income students.

Although a substantial literature points to the contextual basis of competence, many educational

practitioners and researchers continue to treat the underachievement of students raised in poverty as a

biologically or culturally determined trait. Members of the NAE study group believe this is a fundamental

misconception. In our opinion, poverty should be viewed as part of the context of some people’s lives,

not as an essential trait or an immutable state. Furthermore, poverty is not just a context of the poor, it is

also a circumstance that helps to make people poor. In consequence, too many of our citizens are not

just “passing through” poverty—many remain in poverty, generation after generation.

Poverty is too prevalent in our society. Analyses of indicators by the United Nations reveal that

poverty in America is a condition of life for many of our children. The number of hungry Americans (30

million) and the degree of income disparity in the U.S. (the richest 20% of Americans earn 8.9 times

more than the poorest 20%)45 are indicators that show that the challenge of accomplishing high

achievement for low income students involves a large segment of our society.

The gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” is recapitulated in U.S. communities and affects

both urban and rural schools. The proportion of the population living below the poverty threshold

(defined as an annual income of $16,400 for a family of four and $12,802 for a family of three) was

13.3% in 1997. The poverty-level income is less than half of the 1997 median household income of

$37,005. The poverty rates for Hispanics (27.1%) and African Americans (26.5%) are significantly

higher than the rates for whites (11.0 %) and for Asians and Pacific Islanders (14.0%).46

Comparisons of US schooling with schooling in other societies show that we have made some

transitions difficult that need not be, including, for example, sitting still for long hours, decoding by the

end of first grade, and reading for comprehension and number facts by fourth grade. Japanese grade

schools, for example, spend more than half of their days on physical activities and art. These transitions

often harm low-income students because they require considerable early preparation.

Even though it is not necessary for students to display knowledge at required times in order to be

good students months or even years later, our society’s focus on early transitions has produced a

machinery for differential diagnosis and institutional sorting. Students who do not pass successfully
through these (and other) transition points are relegated to special education and remedial education

programs where they learn to define themselves as inferior, as “dumber.” The sorting and labeling

affects low-income students disproportionately.

The first critical transition emerges from the neighborhood in which students and their families live.

The socioeconomic circumstances of neighborhoods determine in large measure the quality of

educational resources available to students. Both the subject-matter contents and the social

arrangements of school learning are organized in ways that differentially favor some children, by

providing better matches to knowledge and social practices that they bring to school.

The children who are favored in this way find it easier to become successful in their early schooling.

Students attending schools in low-income neighborhoods have teachers with fewer formal qualifications,

fewer facilities, and less rigorous curricula than students attending schools in wealthier neighborhoods.47

The lack of resources, in turn, contributes to students’ poor academic performance. Although these

students find transitions into the school learning environment more difficult, fewer resources are generally

made available to support their success.

The patterns of differential access between schools are recapitulated within schools. For all

students to reach high achievement, schools need to support transitions from lower to higher levels of

success by students whose academic performance is low. Students from low-income backgrounds are

more likely to be placed in low-ability groups and low-track classes. Stratified tracking systems that

segregate students in separate programs have been criticized as dysfunctional and undemocratic.

Students placed in low tracks seldom catch up to their peers, seldom receive equivalent instruction or

curriculum, and often suffer the stigma of negative labeling.48

When curriculum is highly stratified, the lowest tier of homogeneous groups fuses with special

education. Special education becomes a dumping ground, the institutional site designated to absorb

students who have fallen behind their age cohort. Like other types of homogeneous groups, special

education classes are disproportionately composed of students from low-income and ethnic-, racial-,

and linguistic-minority backgrounds.

Our report on critical transitions parses our recommendations for research into two main parts: (1)

topics where current research findings can already support productive work in applied research, policy,

and innovative practice, and (2) topics where there is strong potential for research to accomplish

advances of importance to education policy and practice. Within each main topic, our recommendations

focus on two themes: Teaching and Learning, and the Social Organization of Learning. When we

consider Teaching and Learning, we focus on research and improvement in the elementary domains of

literacy, language learning, and mathematics. As we have mentioned, this focus should not be interpreted

as indicating that we believe other curriculum areas are unimportant; rather, these topics illustrate the

kinds of research and development needed throughout the curriculum, and the recommendations we
present can be taken as examples of the general kind of program that should be developed in other

curriculum topics and educational levels as well.

III.2. Current Research That Can Support Productive Work in Policy and Practice

Teaching and Learning

There is a body of clear research and good synthesis concerning literacy, language learning, and

mathematics. The NAE study group believes the research debate in these areas is, for the most part,

settled. In all three, however, there is no clear picture of what happens when people try to apply that

knowledge in various contexts where children from low-income backgrounds are being taught.

Literacy. In the literacy case, the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences

(NRC/NAS) recently issued a significant synthesizing report on beginning reading.49 Research has

established the importance of early reading as a crucial first step in school success. The NRC/NAS

report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, is a large step forward in reviewing

research on the components of effective early literacy programs. Now research is needed to analyze

how these recommendations are or are not put into practice in K-3 programs and what factors lead to

success or to failure.

Language Learning. The NRC has also provided a comprehensive synthesis of research on the

education of linguistically and culturally diverse populations.50 The NRC review of the growing and

robust research literature indicates that certain attributes are important in educational success for

students learning English. These include a supportive school-wide climate, strong school leadership, a

customized learning environment, articulation and coordination within and between schools, use of native

language and culture in instruction, a balanced curriculum that includes both basic and higher-order

skills, explicit skills instruction, opportunities for student-directed instruction, use of instructional

strategies that enhance understanding, opportunities for practice, systematic student assessment, staff

development, and home and parent involvement.

English language learners (ELLs) tend to be new immigrants, who in turn often come from

impoverished families. In 1990, 10 million low-income immigrant children, age 0-17, were readying

themselves for US schools or were already attending them. In 2015, this number is projected to rise to

20 million.51

A special set of critical transitions face these students in our educational institutions. In addition to

making the transition to a new language, English Language Learners must learn new identities and

cultural practices. For example, the language that ELLs use at home or on the playground develops

differently from the language they use in the classroom. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that

immigrant students arrive in the US at all ages, levels of education, and levels of literacy. Elementary
schools have difficulty meeting the cultural and linguistic needs of new immigrants and English Language

Learners. To make matters worse, middle schools, high schools, and colleges are even less well

equipped to meet them.

Important transition points in English language learning include: (1) the transition from oral

proficiency in students’ first language to oral proficiency in their second language, (2) the

transition from oral language to literacy, and (3) the transition into "academic discourse" (when

a student engages written material in math, history, science, social studies, etc., and uses the vocabulary

and conventions of these disciplines in discourse).

Particularly significant for future research, given the linguistic and cultural diversity of our schools and

the diversity of students’ previous educational experience and present social circumstances, are answers

to two strategic questions: What specific educational interventions work well for specific populations of

English Language Learners? What are the short-term and long-term academic and non-academic effects

of these interventions? A related and short-term researchable topic of significance in a new era of

standards-based accountability systems is the academic assessment of non-English speaking students.

The competence of English Language Learning is simply not measured accurately by current techniques

of assessment.

Mathematics. In the case of mathematics, an ambitious framework for educational practice has

been developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.52 Recently, sponsored by the

National Science Foundation and other agencies, several mathematics curricula have been developed to

provide materials for teachers and schools that choose to change their mathematics teaching in the

direction that the NCTM Standards and others have advocated.53 It is important that the effects of

these standards and the effectiveness of these curricula for teaching all students, especially low-income

students, be understood.

 Research in mathematics education and cognitive science has identified conceptual transitions that

are crucial for students learning mathematics, a course of study foundational to all students’ academic

careers. One critical transition in mathematics is understanding scale and order; students first need to

gain basic fluency with small numbers and their relations. A second concerns symbols; students need to

know what it means to represent mathematical knowledge in formal terms. Another important

conceptual understanding concerns the shift from additive to multiplicative functions, that is, the shift

from single quantities to the relations among quantities. A fourth concerns learning that mathematics is a

formal, internally consistent representational system.

 As we discuss in Section IV, OERI should support research to evaluate and understand the types

of teaching methods used as these standards are adopted. We particularly need research that identifies

how teachers can develop understandings and capabilities that support their teaching of critical
mathematical understanding for all students, and what is impeding the implementation of those curricula,

especially in schools with significant numbers of low-income children.

The courses taught in high-poverty schools are often less demanding than those offered in highincome schools. There is a danger that this discrepancy could be increased if the ambitious standards of

educational reform, such as those advocated in the NCTM Standards, are adopted only in schools for

children who are already relatively advantaged, or if they are imposed on schools in which the resources

needed for their successful adoption are not available.54

Researchers are concerned by this possibility, and it has been investigated specifically in the

QUASAR project, funded by the Ford Foundation.55 Results of this research-and-development project

show that ambitious curricula that emphasize students’ conceptual growth in mathematics can be

developed successfully in schools that serve low-income children. The results also show that success

requires support by the school system and its administrators, allocation of adequate resources, and

commitment by teachers to develop their teaching practices. It will be important for OERI to encourage

and support a significant research effort to build on the important results of the QUASAR project and

other research that has begun to examine the conditions in which ambitious curricular reform can

succeed in schools that serve low-income children.

Social Organization of Learning

Many programs designed to encourage meaningful learning by all students, but especially lowincome children, emphasize different ways in which students participate in the activities through which

they learn.56 These programs differ from those of traditional didactic learning and teaching in their

requirements for student participation and new demands on teachers. Research has shown that students

in these programs can benefit from participating more actively in formulating and evaluating questions,

problems, examples, conclusions, explanations, and arguments, rather than limiting their learning activity

to learning to recite the accepted answers to other people’s questions and the accepted explanations

that teachers and textbooks present. Many teachers will have to alter their methods to include such

practices.

At the same time, concerns have been expressed57 that requirements to participate actively in openended discourse may do more harm than good for some students, especially those whose cultural

backgrounds do not include as much of that kind of participation as other students bring to school.

Research is needed to disaggregate the benefits and disadvantages of various ways of organizing

classroom discourse, and to teach educators how these practices can be carried out to the benefit of all

children. There should be projects in which resources are developed to help teachers learn to conduct

classroom activities in ways that are beneficial, especially for low-income students, as we discuss in

Section III.
III.3. Topics of Needed Research With Potential for Advances in Policy and Practice

The topics we discuss in this section involve important issues for educational policy and practice, but

in the judgment of the NAE study group, our current knowledge and understanding are not as far along

as those we discussed in Section II.2. For these topics, we recommend a high priority for research that

would provide fundamental understanding. We emphasize that activities involving development of

educational programs need not wait for this research to be completed, if the development is carried out

in projects that include fundamental research along with development and evaluation. Section IV of this

report focuses on the need to build capacity for that kind of project.

Teaching and Learning

Developing Competence in Complex Reading Tasks. Much is known about getting children

started in reading. But less is known about what competencies and programs help children to succeed

beyond third grade, which is a critical transition because literacy texts and tasks become increasingly

complex at that point. Even children who have made a good start in reading will not automatically

become successful readers later in school, for all the reasons that the expression “critical transitions”

indexes.58

Another candidate for research synthesis is in this area of learning to read complex texts:

interpretation of literature and reading content area materials, particularly science and abstract

representations. Our lack of information is compounded when the students in question are bilingual or

bidialectal. OERI could establish programs of research focused on these higher-level reading

capabilities, leading to development of programs that capitalize on students’ diverse cultural

backgrounds in their learning.

The Need to Focus on Writing. For the most part, the study of literacy focuses largely on reading.

We feel we should also attend to writing. Writing, more than any other curriculum area, is notable for

grass-roots/bottom-up enterprises (e.g., the Bay Area Writing Project, which has developed into the

National Writing Project). There are highly influential, single-author books by teachers or researchers

describing single classrooms. One of the most influential is at the middle school level,59 where research

findings do not have much to say when compared with, say, elementary school. But many of those

books come out of programs where diversity of students is lacking—although see Dyson.60 The writing

practices of children from low-income backgrounds are not adequately studied;61 nor is much said

about the heterogeneity of children in schools. Studying a wider spectrum of children in more varied

environments might give us new ideas for teaching writing.
Mathematics. Substantial numbers of students, especially those from low-income families, are lost

at points of difficulty involving (1) the movement into basic numerical operations and fluency with basic

arithmetic representations; (2) the transition from additive to multiplicative reasoning; (3) the

understanding of formal representations, especially in algebra; and (4) the understanding that

mathematics is an internally consistent system and that one can reason within the system, including both

informal argumentation and formal proof. A synthesis of research on these transitions would move that

research area forward.

Students attending schools in low-income neighborhoods are seldom explicitly taught the principles

associated with these conceptual understandings. They remain implicit, to be inferred or understood

tacitly by students who manage to “see through” the surface structures of procedures that are the main

emphasis of daily instruction and tests. This practice especially harms students raised in poverty,

because they are much more likely to be assigned teachers with less formal preparation in mathematics.

If they don’t learn math the first time, they are simply re-taught the same problems in the same way.

A body of clear research findings shows that people, including children, have significant abilities to

understand and reason mathematically, albeit informally, in many everyday and work activities.62

Research is needed to study the pros and cons, the benefits and problems, when teachers use students’

background knowledge as an organizing base for mathematics curricula. How does the use of students’

knowledge aid student learning? Does the appropriation of students’ knowledge lead to problems in the

development of students’ understanding of mathematics as a cohesive system?

Finally, a synthesis is needed of the research that explores ideas that would undermine the current

lockstep sequencing of mathematics. For example, some researchers are exploring programs that

introduce many mathematical principles earlier in the curriculum than they now appear. These

possibilities deserve systematic cataloguing, especially for the prospect of broadening the population of

students who succeed at what we now see as critical transitional boundaries.

Adult Learning. New immigrants and low-income students often use adult education centers and

community colleges to improve their education, to learn English, and to become literate. That is, these

institutions make important contributions to the democratic function of education that is critical for

integration into our society.

Between instruction in community colleges and adult learning centers on the one hand, and the

demands for literacy and learning in the workplace on the other hand, however, is a large gap.63 There is

evidence that remedial instruction for low-achieving students is being replaced by rich and rigorous

curricula, high standards, and additional academic and social supports in some elementary and high

schools. This is less likely to happen in community colleges, however. Instruction on the academic

tracks that are intended to transfer to 4-year colleges is often dominated by lectures, whereas instruction

in “life-long learning” programs is more likely to use cooperative groups, manipulative materials, and
other engaging techniques. Literacy instruction for low-income students and English Language Learners

in community colleges and adult learning centers is often, unfortunately, still treated as remediation.

From School to Work and Work to School. We have much to learn about the education of lowincome students from the way in which thinking and literacy are employed at work and the way in which

people learn on the job. In calling attention to cognition, literacy, and learning on the job, we do not

want to romanticize the workplace. We recognize that much of blue collar, white collar, and pink collar

work is dreary, repetitive, and even exploitative. With this understanding in mind, we briefly summarize

research that has looked closely at the day-to-day practices of people as they “think at work.”

64

Close observations of people in occupations as diverse as warehousing and high technology show

that they employ many different representational systems and move expertly between them. Literacy in

the workplace is embedded in continuing activities, is collaborative, is project-based, is performative,

and is evaluated for its usefulness. Projects are often presented in multimedia formats. When workers

are solving work-related problems on the shop floor, differences in age, expertise, gender, and ethnicity

are often treated as a resource, not a liability. Workers interrupt work to solve problems about work.

Front-line workers, supervisors, and engineers came together to solve problems, by talking through the

issues and consulting documentation. Reflection on practice is a routine part of work.

This research demonstrates that the students for whom schools typically have low academic

expectations do in fact display considerable competence on the job. If we better understood the

organization and use of this knowledge, we could organize the schooling of low-income students more

effectively.

Social Organization of Learning

Learning Out of School. The activities of children after school and out of school—in the

neighborhood, at work, in youth organizations, in after-school clubs, in the home—are often neglected

topics of investigation. This myopia limits our knowledge about low-income students because the

learning that often matters most to them takes place outside of school, in the “institutional gap” between

the family, school and other formal institutions.

Low-income students who participate in the most effective youth organizations, for instance, engage

in management, security, construction, and financial work.65 Literacy and learning are pervasive in youth

organizations and after-school clubs, although they are often hard to find because they look different

from the literacy and learning we see in school. They occur in a community of practice, are

collaborative, and produce demonstrations or exhibitions as results.

Furthermore, some low-income, recent immigrant, ethnic minority, and ELL students develop and

maintain multiple identities—a community identity in the neighborhood and an academic identity in
school.66 But it is more likely that the identities that low-income students develop do not have exchange

value in formal educational settings because they are not well articulated with each other.

These findings about learning outside of school have implications for the social organization of

education within schools. They imply that placing young people in low surveillance, project-oriented

environments, with productive and meaningful engagement for high performance, with expert guides

helping direct practice, and with authentic evaluation at a particular deadline by outside experts can

make their competence visible.

An important concern involves learning preparedness, which means not only coming to school

prepared to learn on the first day of kindergarten but coming to school prepared to learn every day and

every year. We know that children from low-income backgrounds and children from more affluent

backgrounds have quite different experiences during school vacations. As a result, low-income students

lose more of their learning during the summer months.67

Research on youth organizations,68 after-school clubs,69 and authentic learning environments70

describes programs that capitalize on and further develop competencies of children from low-income

backgrounds. Many of these abilities are not developed or even recognized in schools. Children from

impoverished backgrounds display competence out of school that is often superior to the competence

they display in school because families, youth organizations, and clubs treat young people as productive

resources, community assets, and knowledgeable people, not as damaged goods or deficient cultural

participants.

Researchers should work with schools to organize contexts for educators to discover and make

institutional use of the competence that low-income students display out of school. They could design

and test different models of after-school and summer programs to see what would best motivate,

engage, and benefit children from low-income backgrounds. In making this recommendation we are not

proposing that out-of-school learning environments should be organized to mimic learning environments

within schools. Students living in poverty will not benefit if pedagogy misapplied in one context is

misapplied in another.

The Academic Benefits of Heterogeneity and Diversity. As with literacy, language learning, and

mathematics, clear research and good syntheses demonstrate the harmful outcomes of educational

practices that sort and stratify students disproportionately according to their background characteristics

(race, ethnicity, gender, parents’ income).71 Educational practices such as retention, pull-out remediation

programs, tracking, and segregated special education have enormous negative effects on the lives of

low-income students. Because low-income students are disproportionately represented in such

programs, they seldom receive curriculum and instruction equivalent to those of their more privileged

peers. This uneven distribution of opportunities to learn is manifest not only in structural arrangements,
but in cultural conceptions of race, ability, and intelligence and in the political conditions that influence

decisions about how resources and opportunities are allocated to various groups of students.

A number of studies independently support the idea that heterogeneity and diversity are beneficial to

the social ideals of a democratic society. They suggest that academically demanding, heterogeneous

grouping helps students who have previously been placed in low-track homogeneous groups. Because

these studies have been conducted with diverse populations, at different levels of the educational

system, and often with different methods, a careful synthesis is needed to identify the common principles

and the conditions under which heterogeneous grouping is a successful educational practice.

In addition to this synthesis of common principles, there is a need for research on diversity as an

instructional resource. Though there are social benefits to a diverse instructional setting, an important

area of inquiry is whether there are academic benefits to classroom diversity. In short, does diversity

improve subject-matter learning?

Likewise, there is a considerable body of evidence to show that heterogeneous groups are

beneficial for previously low-achieving students.72 These findings provide a policy rationale for offering

students from low-income backgrounds access to high-track instruction, such as college prep, honors,

gifted, and seminar programs. Such efforts would run counter to the view, prevalent in some

discussions, that a concerted effort needs to be made to eliminate so-called social promotions. OERI

should encourage and support a substantial program of research to understand the effects of

requirements to retain students on teaching and student learning, and to identify and analyze programs

that support learning by all students when they all progress normally through grade levels, with

provisions other than retention made for the known variation in rates of academic progress by individual

students.

Considerably less evidence shows the benefits of heterogeneous grouping for high-achieving

students. Therefore, a vital research question is: Do all students—previously low-achieving as well as

previously high-achieving students—benefit from placement in heterogeneous groups? Do students from

white, middle-income families as well as students from low-income, ethnic and linguistic minority

backgrounds benefit from diverse learning settings? Because of the paucity of information on this topic,

we need to examine the outcomes for high-achieving students as well as the outcomes for previously

low-achieving students in the same heterogeneous groups. Consistent with our conviction that education

serves democratic as well as economic goals, we recommend that research should examine psychosocial outcomes (such as an increased appreciation for difference) as well as academic outcomes (such

as improved performance).

The Generative Processes of Heterogeneous Grouping. Research has shown that there are

beneficial outcomes of heterogeneous grouping, but much less is known about the processes that

contribute to beneficial outcomes. In particular, we need to develop a more complete inventory of
knowledge about effective practices for teaching academically challenging curricula in heterogeneous

groups. We also need research to learn more about the types of teaching practices that are effective in

diverse classrooms and the types of school organization that support learning in diverse environments.

Students transferring into academically demanding courses of study need academic supports to help

them make the transition. Homogeneous grouping creates cumulative handicaps for children in low

academic tracks. The longer students remain in low-track classes, the further they fall behind their peers.

Offering all students an academically challenging curriculum presents difficulties because of the range in

incoming student achievement. For example, requiring that all students take Algebra I will present strong

skill-based challenges for students transferring in from general, remedial, or business math. By contrast,

students from high tracks most likely will enter a course such as algebra with the skills to meet the

academic demands.

Programs that place previously low-achieving students in rigorous courses of study accompanied by

systems of social and academic support show promise for improving the academic achievement of lowincome students. Puente and AVID are examples of such programs.73 They establish an “existence

proof” that previously low-achieving students can succeed in demanding courses of study. We need

more systematic information about the processes and principles that make such programs successful.

More specifically, what are some of the teaching and organizational practices that facilitate

previously low-achieving students’ success in academically demanding learning environments? Some

possible areas of inquiry are cross-age tutoring, the homeroom, the school-based building of social and

cultural capital, the productive use of students’ “funds of knowledge,” and exposing the hidden

curriculum of the school.74

Practitioners and researchers now need to collaborate to develop alternative strategies to promote

the cognitive and social development of low-income students. Projects that combine programmatic

innovations with research that examines the processes of learning in heterogeneously grouped learning

environments can be especially valuable targets of the kind of problem-solving basic research that is

recommended in Section II of this report.

A Special Emphasis on Middle School, High School, and Community College. Most of the

research on heterogeneous grouping has been conducted in elementary schools. We need research that

concentrates on effective pedagogical practices in middle schools, high schools, and community

colleges. A concentration on community college is particularly important because of its special role in the

lives of new immigrants, low-income students, and English Language Learners. The community college

connects these groups of students to the democratic concerns of society and gives them the tools they

need for economic success.

The education that new immigrants and low-income students receive in community colleges and

adult learning centers helps them take a first step, but seldom many steps, up the ladder of social and
economic mobility. We need to understand why the transition from 2-year to 4-year institutions does

not produce more extensive social mobility. This investigation will be valuable if it does not just focus on

the presumed limitations of 2-year institutions but turns attention to the institutional arrangements and

academic demands of 4-year institutions as they relate to the 2-year and K-12 sectors. For example,

the college entrance requirements that often drive the organization of the K-12 curriculum invite special

attention.

This line of research is also important because the programs that “untrack” previously low-achieving

students do help them improve academically, but they do not send them to the head of the class. For

example, the very successful Puente and AVID programs increase the number of Latino students

attending the California State University, but they do not increase significantly the number of Latino

students attending the University of California (which has more rigorous entrance requirements).

Likewise, these programs increase the number of Latino students taking AP courses, but they do not

increase the number of Latino students passing the AP exam. These findings encourage research to

determine which teaching and organizational arrangements significantly improve the academic

performance of low-income students once schools have begun to undo their tracking systems.

Community Building. The mobilization of parent groups against educational reforms such as

integration (particularly busing) and detracking (the elimination of homogeneous grouping at the

secondary school level) suggests that school reform is more than just a technical challenge.75 School

reform also requires political and cultural change at the school and in the wider community.

We need to understand the interplay between the technical, cultural, and political dimensions of

schooling. We know that educational professionals at every level of the school system—classroom

teachers, principals, superintendents—need to support an academically rigorous curriculum for all

students. But the conditions and processes that lead educators to alter fundamental cultural norms about

ability, learning as individual “acquisition,” teaching as transmission, and achievement as individualistic

and competitive are not known. How can teachers sustain new norms, and what effect do such shifts

have on access?

Likewise, we know that educators need to cooperate with families and community groups to sustain

reform efforts. This basic observation leads to a more difficult research question: How can education

professionals build these all-important alliances? The possibility of divisive cleavages among parent

groups based on socioeconomic status requires research attention. How can schools that work to

achieve equal educational opportunity retain children from families used to having a competitive

advantage?

These issues also lead to consideration of how research on the education of low-income children

can be used to strengthen the community and the whole society. It is not enough to change or improve

individuals. We also need to change and improve communities. If we change individuals only, their
motivation may be to “get out” of “bad” communities. It does not benefit society as a whole if we force

people to make a choice between leaving their communities and staying in them in order to be

successful. If, on the other hand, we improve communities, it matters less whether particular individuals

leave. Shifting our thinking beyond improving individuals and to strengthening communities requires a

very different research orientation. It requires looking at cognitive and social outcomes for the

community and society as well as for the individual.

III.4. Summary

Our society is in a critical transition in our thinking about the very meaning of public education. On

the one hand, we note an increasing recognition that students are a focal point of complex social and

cultural forces, not a bundle of psychological states and traits. On the other hand, calls to privatize

education through vouchers and some charter school proposals threaten the idea that public schools are

a social good available to all students regardless of their parents’ ability or willingness to pay.

These issues create both challenges and opportunities for research on the education of low-income

students and the transformation of research knowledge into usable educational practice. In this report

we have said that the lives of low-income students are marked by critical transitions. Within schools,

these include the transitions between courses of study or “tracks.” Outside of school, these include the

transitions between school, the family, work, and community organizations.

We have suggested that the research community has accumulated a sufficient body of knowledge

regarding some issues in the areas of mathematics, literacy, language development, and the social

organization of instruction. Therefore OERI can focus attention on developing appropriate strategies to

help practitioners apply that knowledge in various contexts where children from low-income

backgrounds are taught.

We identified a second class of topics where there is strong potential for research advances of

importance to educational policy and practice. These topics include the study of complex reading tasks

(especially above grade 3), a special emphasis on writing, and more successful learning of mathematics

with conceptual understanding. These topics also include learning in the institutional gap between

schooling and other organizations, the academic and social benefits of academically challenging courses

accompanied by social scaffolding, and language and learning in middle school, high school, and

community college. Finally, we must learn how to build strong communities.

Attending to these research agendas will help Americans to build strong democratic conventions and

institutions and prepare low-income students for an increasingly competitive economic world.
IV. TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

IV.1. The Panel’s Mission

The work of this panel was conducted under the assumption that teachers’ professional

development is related to reaching the goal of high achievement for all students. The panel was

concerned particularly with producing knowledge about the connection between professional

development and improving education for currently underserved populations. Students living in poverty

and ethnic minorities have been historically underserved by American educational institutions and are an

increasingly large proportion of the student population. No one doubts that teachers will have much to

learn in the years to come in order to be successful in helping all students reach high levels of

achievement.

Researchers and policy makers have learned from our previous lack of attention to teaching and

teacher learning. Hence recent federal, state, and private efforts to improve education are placing a

much greater emphasis on investing in professional development76 for teachers. We are politically and

economically poised to invest in teacher development in ways unlike previous reforms. But despite the

recent interest, our understanding of professional development and factors that affect what teachers

learn and do is uneven and underdeveloped. Therefore our knowledge of the processes whereby it can

improve education is weak. Though researchers have learned a good deal in the past several decades,

much more remains to be learned about the practice of teaching itself and what it takes to teach, as well

as the kinds of experiences that enable teachers to develop the abilities, dispositions, knowledge, and

skills to do that work.

Given the current state of American education, the assumption that teachers’ professional

development is related to reaching the unattained goal of high achievement for all students implies a

related pair of assertions, illustrated in figure 1:

A. that a change in teaching practice can cause a positive change in student learning,

especially for those students who do not now reach high achievement, and

B. that teachers’ professional development can cause such a change in teaching practice.
TEACHERS' 

PROFESSIONAL 

DEVELOPMENT

HOW 

TEACHERS DO 

THEIR WORK

WHAT 

 PARTICULAR 

STUDENTS 

LEARN

CAN 

 

CHANGE 

CAN 

 

CHANGE 

figure 1

Accordingly, the study group’s report concerning teachers’ professional development is organized

around two key issues:

• how teachers effect student learning

• effects of teachers’ professional development on teaching.

IV.2. What We Know and What We Need to Know

This section reviews research that has been done on each of the relevant issues and analyzes where

our knowledge breaks down, particularly with regards to connecting teachers' professional development

to working toward the goal of high achievement for all students, without regard to ethnicity, gender,

language, and social class. There is no neat package of research that bears on the topic of this panel.

We have sought to become broadly informed about research on the relevant issues and we have

organized what we have learned in this section in terms of the effects of teaching on learning, teachers'

knowledge and skill, teachers' opportunities to learn, and teaching as professional practice. In the next

section, we cull from this diverse set of themes to delineate the research agenda that flows from

considering the intersections and gaps in what we know, and what we need to know if teachers are to

develop in ways that broadly improve learning for all students.

We first examine what we know about the conditions under which a change in teaching practice can

cause a change in student learning. Although we recognize a considerable body of research on "teacher

effects," we note that this research has not been easy to translate into strategies for making all teachers

effective with all students. Some commentators attribute this "translation problem" to a lack of attention

to teachers' intentions as well as to their knowledge and skill. We also observe that this research has

been weak in recognizing and describing variations in teaching activities in relation to variations in the

characteristics of the particular setting in which teaching occurs, i.e. who the students are and what it is

those students are to learn. We look briefly at research on teacher knowledge and skill, focusing on

how professional development responded to earlier research on instructional practice and examining

work on teacher qualifications, particularly as it pertains to the problem of providing competent teachers

for underserved populations.
We turn next to research on school context for what it has to offer to our understanding of teachers'

opportunities to learn. This research is the most comprehensively related to the issues raised by our

panel's charge and leads us to adopt the theoretical framework of "learning in and from practice" for

situating our recommendations. We then move to identifying the research problems arising from the

assertion that teacher development can cause a change in teaching practice. We investigate what we

know about teachers' professional learning as the individual and collective improvement of teaching

practice.

As we try to maintain the connection between teacher learning and student learning. we observe that

research on teacher learning has focused primarily on the acquisition of skills, dispositions, and

knowledge with little attention to how these play out in what teachers do or in what students learn. We

adopt the perspective that teaching is a complex practice and consider the continuous learning of

teaching across the teacher's career as an integral part of that practice. We review what is known about

learning in practices such as teaching, with particular attention to the role that professional communities

play in such learning, since it is in such communities that norms of practice are established.

How Teachers Effect Student Learning

Research that links teaching with learning is the ultimate goal of what teachers do and the

development of the profession.

• What do we know about the connections between what teachers do and what students learn?

• Where does that knowledge break down in decoupling school success from race, ethnicity, gender,

and social class?

 The Effect of Variations in Instruction. Researchers have identified some unusually effective

teachers, as judged by their students’ gains on standardized tests, and noticed that their practice seemed

very different from their less effective peers’. More effective teachers plan lessons carefully, select

appropriate materials, make their goals clear to students, maintain a brisk pace in lessons, check

students’ work regularly, and teach material again when students have trouble learning.77 Teachers of

this sort have coherent strategies for instruction and deploy lessons, books, and other resources in ways

consistent with the strategies. They believe that their students can learn and that they have a

responsibility to help. They have definite objectives and organize instruction to achieve them. Though

often traditional and didactic, these teachers’ lessons are well thought-out, well organized, and

appropriately paced. Typically these teachers use conventional tests and texts as part of a well-crafted

strategy to improve children’s learning.

Less successful teachers do not have coherent strategies for instruction and deploy resources in

scattered and inconsistent ways.78 They have vague or non-academic objectives, and their lessons are

disorganized and not well thought-out. Classroom work typically is badly paced, and teachers do not
regularly check to see how students are doing—and even if they do check they do not make many midcourse corrections to accommodate students’ responses. Teachers of this sort do not exert themselves

to make educationally fruitful connections with students; many act as though they believe that their

responsibility is only to “present the material” and let students get it if they can. When such teachers

work with children from disadvantaged circumstances, they often act as though students can handle only

watered-down instruction.

Others have looked at how time spent on instruction affects learning.79 Considered in isolation, time

is not a potent or consistent influence on learning. One reason is that measuring the time that teachers

spend teaching something does not necessarily reflect the time that students spend studying it. The

important point concerns the relations among how teachers organize instruction, what tasks students

perform, and actual learning. What counts for learning is how teachers and students fill time. Some

researchers have objected to some of this work, partly on the grounds that the criterion of effectiveness

was standardized test performance. Though such tests do offer a limited range of assessment

possibilities, there is increasing evidence that the tests measure things that predict students’ success in

school. No less important, research can systematically connect professional practice with students’

learning, and such connections are crucial to the improvement both of practice and learning. It is

possible to define and measure teaching and learning tasks, to observe the extent to which they are

related, and to probe their effects on academic learning. Such knowledge of effective practice is in

principle be an important element in teacher development.

Teachers’ Knowledge and Skill. One outcome of research on effective teaching (unintended by

those who conducted it) was for reformers to assume that if teachers did not teach effectively, it was

because they did not know what was effective. Knowledge for teaching was equated with knowledge of

research findings, and teacher learning was considered a “skill transfer problem.”

Both research on teacher learning and teacher development practice were dominated by a skill

training paradigm for many years. Coaching emphasized expert demonstrations and feedback on

teacher practice. Later developments in the model—especially those centered on peer coaching rather

than expert coaching—placed greater emphasis on teachers’ opportunity to engage in problem solving

and to talk at length about their interpretation of practice. The eventual introduction of “cognitive

coaching” as a term may reflect the growing influence of research on teachers’ thinking, beliefs, and

judgments.

A very different approach to research on teachers’ knowledge and skill appears in the literature on

teacher qualifications. Knowledge was seen as formal education: how many courses have been taken in

what areas? Standards for what teachers need to know and be able to do to enter teaching and to stay

in the profession are inconsistent across states and districts. Hundreds of studies have shown that “fully
prepared” teachers are more effective than those who are unqualified.80 Schools that serve the poor

and students of color have a disproportionate number of “unqualified” teachers.

A third approach to research on teachers’ knowledge and skill has come with a recent wave of

attention to teachers’ “subject matter knowledge” or lack thereof. Central to the conception of teaching

as a practice that requires knowledge of subject, instructional method, students, and how they learn is

the notion of pedagogical content knowledge—the specific knowledge of how to teach particular

subjects. Research on the acquisition of subject teaching knowledge has developed rapidly. Studies of

what teachers do and do not know about mathematics, history, science, and the like have been justified

on the assumption that “you cannot teach what you do not know.” But none of these studies looks

either at what teachers do differently depending on variations in their subject matter knowledge, nor on

whether students’ learning is indeed affected.

Intentionality. Relating research on teacher effectiveness and attention to teachers’ knowledge and

skill neglects the crucial gap between knowing what to do and doing it. A distinction between

knowledge of what makes teachers effective and knowledge of how effective teachers teach is useful.81

A recent line of work on teacher effectiveness focuses specifically on teachers who are successful with

African-American children; it found that they have many of the same qualities as the successful teachers

in the older "teacher effects" studies and they have the will to succeed with African-American students.82

Additionally, culturally relevant teaching methods challenge students intellectually by teaching to the

highest standards, not the lowest common denominator; provide instructional “scaffolding” so that

students can move from what they know to what they need to know; make instruction the foremost

activity in the classroom; and are constructed out of thorough knowledge of both the students and the

subject matter. These teachers teach in a way that intentionally includes all students. This inclusiveness

requires us to consider teaching as requiring more than a bundle of technical skills—it also demands

moral commitment and the ability to act on that commitment.

 Differentiating Successful Teacher Practices According to What Students Are to Learn.

Teaching different subjects (like mathematics and social studies) has some elements in common, but it

also has significant differences, and the differences become more evident as the content becomes more

complex.83 What teachers need to do also differs depending on the nature of the learning goals for their

students within a particular subject. If students are to learn to repeat what they have read or heard,

teaching is one kind of work. If they are to learn to read a text and use what they have read to solve a

problem, teaching is another kind of work. Teachers work in a particular institutional context; they must

reference their ambitions for students to the district curriculum and other elements in the environment.

They must think and act strategically as they face competing priorities and demands in their efforts to

engage students with a task. Thinking about where students might go in an academic domain involves
gathering evidence about where students are. Weighing where students are involves understanding the

variety of ways in which students may display knowledge.

We have come to expect all students to learn to more rigorous academic standards than have ever

been set in the history of this country.84 Teaching K-12 students powerful academic skills, knowledge,

and dispositions, and teaching them so that all students are able to perform to uniformly high standards,

is complicated work. Even when teachers have high levels of appropriate knowledge, it is hard to teach

classrooms full of students, especially when the students do not come to school already disposed

toward intellectual work. Existing research on the effects of teaching practices has little to say about the

particular student learning goal of “achieving high literacy.” The standardized tests used as a measure of

learning were not designed to measure the kinds of problem solving and communication skills that we

now expect students to acquire. But even more important, given the purpose of this report, is that none

of this research, even the most recent work on teacher intentionality, gives us much insight into what it

takes to do effective and successful teaching with diverse populations of students or how teachers will

acquire what it takes to do it.

Contextual Factors and the Effects of Teaching. Moving out from the practices of individual

teachers to the settings in which they teach, we find additional research that tells us “what matters” to

student success. It is relevant here because it attends not only to what teachers know and do as

resources in producing student learning, but to the context in which they work. Much of this work has

compared schools. Some schools have produced unusually large achievement gains, and it would be

useful to identify what distinguishes them from run-of-the-mill schools for what we can learn about

contexts for the improvement of teaching. Researchers in this tradition have tried to identify how the

context of teaching might change teaching practices in ways that affect student learning.

We are beginning to understand that what matters is how teachers make use of contextual factors

to support their efforts to improve their practice. This is a major step beyond seeing the context as an

independent element that either supports or interferes with student success regardless of what teachers

do.

Faculty in unusually effective schools share a vision of the purposes of instruction, agree that their

school’s purpose is to promote students’ learning, and believe that they are responsible for helping

students to learn. Principals offer strong leadership, and teachers have a strong commitment to students’

academic success. They also have the ability to monitor students’ learning.85

Critics have pointed out crucial problems with this line of work, including inter-annual variation in

effectiveness as well as problems in reasoning from schools with unusually high performance to more

ordinary schools. Studies have focused almost exclusively on elementary schools and did not take

account of the organizational differences between primary and secondary schools.86
Nevertheless, some characteristics that distinguish effective schools have been identified. In one

study, more effective high schools were more likely to have teachers who shared a commitment to their

students’ academic success and believed that they had an obligation to help students do so.87 More

effective high schools are likely to be smaller and small schools seem to increase the probability that

academic communities with high expectations for all students can be constructed.88 Effective high

schools establish and maintain communities in which students and teachers take responsibility for each

other, academically and socially. Students are likely to study the same curriculum, for there is little

curriculum tracking in small schools. Students in such schools had higher achievement, and it is

especially noteworthy that achievement differences between advantaged and disadvantaged students

decreased over the high school years. Typical secondary schools are much more fragmented and

anomic. Teachers, staff, and students in these weaker schools share no common vision of instructional

purposes, no common commitment to students’ success, and no common curriculum. Teachers and

students have little contact outside of class, the schools have low morale, and achievement differences

between advantaged and disadvantaged students increase over the high school years.

As well as school size, class size seems to affect learning. Evidence suggests that 25-30%

reductions in class size produce substantial gains in student learning growth, other things being equal.89

The effects of class size could be produced in two somewhat different ways. Students could benefit

because smaller classes provide teachers with better opportunities to use their existing knowledge and

skills—more time to spend with each student, more opportunities to read students’ work, more time to

prepare, and so on. Smaller classes could also enable teachers to learn additional knowledge and skills

on their own, which would enable them to further improve their teaching and their students’ learning.

Teachers could turn things that they already knew to better advantage, rather than learning dramatically

new instructional approaches.

These speculations about school size and class size as contexts not only for student learning but for

teacher learning suggest that the work of teaching is made more or less difficult by the resources that are

available in the context. Instead of changing what teachers know, we might try to understand what

resources could be made available for their learning to improve their practice. Although research on

school size and class size begins to identify what some of those resources might be and how teachers

can use them to improve student learning, many contextual factors remain to be examined. What is at

issue here is the interaction of teacher and context that supports teachers’ capacities for learning what it

takes to do their work.

Focus on Teaching as a Professional Practice

Teaching is a system of activities, performed by people with knowledge, skills and beliefs in

contexts. What teachers do requires figuring out how to use what they bring to the classroom, what their

students bring, and the resources available. What we don’t know from research on context is how
changing the circumstances of teaching would affect what teachers actually do under their new

circumstances to have a differential impact on learning. In order to relate changes in teaching to

professional development and the improvement of student learning, we argue that teaching should be

represented as a dynamic, interactive, and context-related practice.

Characteristics of Competent Performance. Many research findings emphasize that successful

work in practices like teaching involves flexible, intelligent improvisation, especially in the construction

and maintenance of the social interactions that are crucial in work activities. Social psychologists have

shown that the “task demands” of improvisational work entail systems of skills and knowledge to be

integrated in action rather than decomposable subsystems that can be mastered one at a time and then

used independently in practice.90 In solving complex problems, it is mastering the relations among

subsystems, including action scenarios as well as culture, identity, norms, and the like, that constitutes

competent performance.91 Some have argued that the proper unit of analysis when we are looking at the

relationship between knowledge and action should be joint socially mediated activity in a cultural

context.92 We are attracted to this formulation of the relationship between knowledge and action

because it helps in explaining how teachers' will to have all students succeed is shaped by the norms of

his or her professional community and can be related to effective action in teaching all students.

The fundamental characteristic of action and thought in complex practices is that they are not

isolated from one another. Knowledge builds on whatever the practitioner brings into the work. Even

when work is routine, merely a matter of carrying out a set of procedures and rules, engaged

participation is a continual process of reflective inquiry. Practice involves knowledge in action that

responds to interactions across problem domains. The demands of context cannot always be predicted

in advance. Successful work integrates both planning for learning and negotiating learning in the

performance of the work.

 Implications for Knowing and Doing the Practice of Teaching. Similar arguments about what

knowledge is for the practice of teaching in particular echo through a large body of work on teacher

cognition.93 Commonly “improvisation” is used as a metaphor for the work of teaching, especially

teaching that aims to engage students in sophisticated problem-focused work.94 Teaching, especially

teaching that responds to differences in student characteristics, requires constant on-the-spot analysis

and learning in context. Highly scripted instructional planning and execution are associated with more

rigid patterns of student behavior in class.

This kind of knowing-in-action has been called “strategic knowledge,” and it is distinguished from

propositional knowledge and case knowledge by needing to be created in the particular circumstances

of practice. It obviously cannot be created outside and carried into the context—it must be grounded in

the practice of teaching.
We know little about either how teachers come to be able to use such strategic knowledge or

about how they might learn to use it. These are essential areas for research. We do know, from

analyses of knowledge use in other professions, that it is not productive to treat strategic knowledge for

teaching as a collection of discrete knowledges and skills applied todiscrete tasks.95 Accomplished

professional practice is more usefully considered to be a system of actions that must be performed

intentionally and coherently.

Even if we had a rich understanding of the task demands of teaching complex academic practices to

diverse populations, we would still be only part way toward ensuring that teachers know how to do

these tasks systematically and coherently. Elements of the system we need to understand include:

Figuring out what students know

Planning and rehearsing for and reflecting on teaching

Selecting and using materials/tasks

Arranging the physical environment

Constructing relations with and among students

Establishing and maintaining a social learning environment

Working and communicating with other adults (parents, colleagues,

administrators)

Managing the teacher’s time, organization, record keeping, communication

Managing classroom routines and time

Doing successful teaching involves the ability to use knowledge and skill to perform and integrate

these elements of practice—not only knowing when to use them but knowing how and intending to

make the effort. Research on teacher development needs to investigate both how these systems of

action function in teaching to promote student learning, and how they are acquired by professionals.

The Role of Professional Learning in Teaching. Changes in teaching practice will not happen

unless teachers have opportunities to learn to practice their profession responsibly. This means that

research needs to examine not only how teachers can learn to improve learning for all students, but how

teaching can be organized to make professional learning an integral part of its fabric.

Policy, curriculum, improved subject matter knowledge, additional resources, and salary incentives

have all been known to “change teaching,” but we have little understanding of the mechanisms by which

these interventions bring about improvement in teachers’ strategic knowledge. As catalysts for change,

these interventions are always filtered through teachers, individually and as a profession.

 We do understand that the norms of communities of professional practice can stymie efforts to

educate teachers to teach differently. The assumption that professionals get trained for their work before

they start, and then just do what they have been trained to do, is false. People always learn in their
activity, however it is arranged. But their learning does not necessarily develop the complex abilities

needed for effective practice. Instead, people can develop strategies of coping superficially with the

requirements of work without personal engagement in the activity. For example, teachers can learn in

practice not to expect all students to achieve to high standards. We must figure out how to organize

practice to produce the more desirable outcome of high expectations for all and the sense of efficacy

that accompanies it.

As we argued above, teaching entails complex problem solving in particular contexts. Teachers do

not form their expectations of students in isolation, and thus they do not “learn” to teach students from

racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities in isolation. The research on the characteristics of effective schools

cited above suggests that the will to succeed with all students is strongly influenced by the kinds of

interactions teachers have with their students and their professional peers. Research focused on teaching

as a profession would thus recognize the importance of teachers’ participation in professional

communities and provide better understanding of the ways in which collegial interactions support the

continued learning needed to strengthen teaching practice.96 These communities are, for better or

worse, powerful settings for professional development and for teacher education, even at the preservice

and induction levels. Participation in a successful community of practice provides career trajectories in

which individuals build professional identities.

The Effect of Teachers’ Professional Development on Teaching

A broad look at what is known about teaching and how it affects students learning led us to focus

on teaching as professional practice. If we regard teaching as professional practice, how can teacher

development affect what teachers do and thereby improve what students can learn? We focus more

pointedly here on what is known (or not known) about a set of related questions:

• Under what conditions can the teaching profession support the kind of learning that would enable

changes in practice toward achieving the student learning goals we have identified?

• What is entailed in learning how to teach, given that teaching involves not only skill and knowledge

but the will to succeed with all students and the ability to construct actions in response to the

context?

• What do we know about contexts and pedagogies of teachers’ professional development as it

relates to learning the work of teaching—that is, what is entailed in teaching how to teach?

• Where does our knowledge in each of these areas break down in decoupling school success from

race, ethnicity, gender, and social class?

Lack of Opportunities to Learn In and From Practice. One crucial factor in the failure of reform

has been a repeated lack of opportunity for teacher learning. In the curriculum reforms of the 1950s and

1960s, the kinds of “training” offered to teachers afforded few opportunities to learn to use the new
materials. The same appears to have been true with the many new curricula that NSF and other agencies

have sponsored since that time, and with recent efforts at standards-based reform. Whether efforts to

improve schools have succeeded or failed, they rarely include attention to the demands they place on

teachers or to what happens in the daily work of teaching to contribute to their success or failure. But

when teachers have had opportunities to learn what the reforms require, we observe that they have

responded much more constructively. Almost no research exists that can give us insight into what and

how teachers learn from practice or how practice could be organized to provide greater opportunities for

teacher learning.

Most professional education is disjoint from professional practice in public education. A persistent

problem of teacher education and professional development is that teachers often cannot use the ideas

they learn, or that they find the subject matter irrelevant. No matter what gets emphasized in teacher

education or what kind of institutional structure exists for professional development, skills, knowledge,

and dispositions are taught in isolation from the settings in which they must be used, thereby setting up the

problem of “transfer.” Sometimes a lack of support is blamed for the lack of transfer of what teachers

learn.

Although both relevance and support may be crucial to overcoming the disjunctures between

professional education and teaching practice, there is also growing evidence that these gaps arise as a

consequence of the complexity of using knowledge in teaching.97 Learning more about discrete

mathematics, for example, does not necessarily enable teachers to notice, interpret, or use children’s

ideas about counting; learning more about the role of interpretation in understanding literature does not

necessarily result in teachers designing lessons that engage students in interpretive activities; learning

about the characteristics of different ethnic and racial groups does not change the way teachers teach

students from those groups.

Four categories of professional interaction appear to support learning in practice.98 First, teachers

and administrators in successful schools are more likely to talk about teaching practice. Talking about

teaching practice is distinct from talking about teacher characteristics and failings, problems with students

and their families, and the demands of society on schools. Rather, it is concrete and focused. Second,

teachers in successful schools observe colleagues teaching and provide feedback and critique. Third,

these teachers plan and design curriculum and lessons together. Fourth, these teachers actively teach

each other how to teach, taking on leadership roles during in-services. Teachers need time for guided

cycles of collaborative consideration, communication, reflection, and action. Peer coaching has proven

successful, but it must center on curriculum and instruction, and the specific focus of the coaching

sessions must emerge from the teachers’ own contexts.99

 Limited Appreciation of Changing One's Practice On the Individual Level. The simple model of

learning to teach that has dominated both the design of teacher education and the conduct of research on
teacher change is that knowledge goes in during teacher education and professional development and

then comes out to be used in classrooms.100 Conventional schooling, from kindergarten through college,

teaches us that knowledge is lodged in textbooks, experts, and people with more experience. It comes in

the form of rules, definitions, and facts that are to be remembered, practiced, and applied. Being a good

learner means learning the rules well and applying them appropriately.

Such assumptions about learning are at odds with what we know about the role of knowledge in the

activities of teaching.101 We reject the notion that being able to teach competently transfers easily from

one context to another. If teaching is complex in the ways described above, we cannot just do research

on the activities of successful teaching of “high literacy” to diverse student populations and then deliver

what we learn in the form of courses or workshops. Constructing action in the context in which

knowledge needs to be used is an essential aspect of teaching,102 and one must be attentive to the

consequences of action and prepared to make speedy shifts of direction. When an appreciation for this

kind of deliberate action is absent, the connection between knowing and doing is truncated to the

“application of theory to practice” or the enactment of learned technical skills.103 It is not professional

development.

We need to know more about conventional expectations so teachers can learn to share the

responsibility for solving the problems of practice. We have learned from research in other nations that

this view of learning to teach is not internationally consistent. Recent research in and from other countries

suggests that teachers’ work and their professional cultures can support learning in professional

practices.104

The TIMSS case studies make the connections among school cultures, professional development,

and teacher enhancement very clear, for there appear to be important differences in school culture,

particularly around the ways in which teachers come together and the degree to which this collaboration

supports teachers learning in and through practice.105 106 107.Further research can elaborate on these

ideas.

Limited Appreciation of Changing Teaching Practice On the Institutional Level. In all, almost

1300 public and private institutions prepare teachers. Although about a third of them—mostly large

public universities—prepare three-fourths of the teachers, the structure of teacher education programs

varies widely. The variation is multiplied when one looks at program structure. Some teacher preparation

occurs at the undergraduate level as part of either a four-year bachelor’s degree program or a five-year

program; some teacher preparation occurs at the post-B.A. level, as a fifth-year program. Some

programs comprise alternate routes to certification. Most of these aim to recruit non-traditional students

with degrees in other fields.

Professional development for practicing teachers is yet more diffuse. Teachers enroll in master’s

degree programs, earn continuing education credits, and take or are “delivered” a noncoherent
“program” of study (“program” is a misnomer in this case). The “staff development industry” is a vast

enterprise, with many different kinds of organizations, institutions, groups, and individuals sponsoring

opportunities for teachers. These offerings are not coordinated in any way, and teachers’ histories

comprise experience with a wide assortment of disparate activities. Teachers’ opportunities to learn are

fragmented and superficial, and they often have little effect on practice.

Instructors and teacher developers, too, compose no homogeneous group. Although we tend to

think of faculty in schools of education when we speak of “teacher educators,” prospective teachers in

fact spend more time in classes taught by faculty in the arts and sciences than by faculty in education

departments. This is no small influence on prospective teachers’ development.

Although multiple systems exist for licensing or certifying classroom teachers, with more or less

attention given to teachers’ ability to teach effectively, there are no such requirements for becoming a

teacher educator. The most common route to this career in higher education is a Ph.D. or Ed.D. in

“Curriculum and Instruction” or one of the foundational disciplines, and the degree programs rarely

include experience in classroom teaching. Providers of professional development are even more varied

than preservice teacher educators. Certainly, one form of teacher development is still taking courses at

colleges and universities, but there are also a myriad of “workshops” of shorter and longer durations, in

and out of the school system. Although no one knows whether teachers of teachers are prepared to

support teachers learning in practice as we have described it here, the evidence suggests there is a

serious deficit in this area. We know little about what successful supporters of teachers do, and we

know even less about how they learn to do it.

Learning in Communities of Practice. As we noted above, research has identified some school

settings where teachers can take professional responsibility for improving their practice with all students

and make a particular commitment to students from traditionally underserved populations.108 This

research has done far more to illuminate the school as a professional community than to show precisely

how schools actually achieve differential effects on students. General staff cooperation and morale have a

weak relationship to student experience and achievement, and strong professional communities can

constrain teacher learning and success with all students as well as promote it.109 What makes the

difference is whether the culture of practice—beliefs, norms, and organizational policies—engenders high

or low expectations for the success of all students and encourages or discourages teacher learning and

collective responsibility.110 Collaboration around the tasks of teaching also seems to improve student

learning.

Research has steadily converged on the importance of teacher learning communities and, at the

same time, on the relative difficulty of creating and sustaining those communities that are successful in

enhancing the impact of teaching on student learning.111 A “teacher learning community is not simply the

collection of good and committed teachers,” but a group that develops collective expertise by
employing problem-solving, critique, reflection, and debate.112 As the prior studies would lead us to

anticipate, however, such practices fly in the face of traditional norms of professional practice. Typically,

frustrated teachers must work in professional environments with powerful norms of privacy. They are

less likely to be challenged about outdated assumptions about practice or students and also are less

likely to receive support for trying something different. As a “target population” they present special

challenges for those who would seek to educate them and for scholars who seek to understand how

teacher development can improve school achievement for all students.

IV.3. Proposed Research Priorities

The research program we recommend is designed to inform our thinking about this set of assertions

by investigating:

• Particular kinds of teaching practice, namely how teachers might teach poor and racially and

ethnically diverse students in K-12 schools so that they achieve high academic standards

• How those practices can be learned

• How schools can simultaneously support learning by all teachers and by all students.

If teachers’ professional development and improving student learning in currently unsuccessful

schools are to be connected, learning to teach within the context of professional development would:

• Be situated in the activity domains of teaching, i.e., in how teachers do their work

• Be heavily influenced by the kinds of teaching that teachers are learning and the kinds of students

they are teaching.

• Be attentive to differences among school subjects as well as within subjects in terms of the level of

learning expected.

Research could support professional development by:

• Identifying the types of activity involved in teaching K-12 students in particular classroom settings

• Investigating what it takes to teach effectively with activities of each of these types when the students

live in poverty or are from ethnic, racial, and linguistically diverse communities

• Investigating how teachers learn to teach well with these types of activity—i.e., how teachers

throughout their careers develop the abilities to do this work

• Investigating what it takes to teach professionals in the various institutional organizations in which

professional development occurs—i.e., identifying the activities that teach teachers to be masters of

their practice when their students live in poverty or are from ethnic, racial, and linguistically diverse

communities

• And finally, examining how those who support the professional development of teachers might learn

their practice.
We propose research that takes account of what we know about the relationship between research

and practice and takes advantage of current reform efforts. We emphasize an approach to research that

is sensitive to teaching and learning at three levels: K-12 classrooms, teacher development, and training

of teacher educators.

Use Existing Reform Efforts for Research on Teachers’ Professional Development

Though the approach to research we have outlined -- beginning with identifying effective teaching

activities and moving to how teachers learn those activities and then to how teacher developers might

support that teacher learning -- has a neat linear logic, we do not think that research has the leisure to

proceed one step at a time. Time is short for many American children. And America is populated with

an extraordinary variety of efforts—large and small—to improve teaching and learning. Some of these

efforts are “ordinary” in the sense that they are part of the continuous stream of new ideas that enter

schools regularly. Others are extraordinary, in that they represent large-scale efforts to change how

instruction is delivered. Both types of reform offer unparalleled opportunities to learn about teaching and

professional education by capitalizing on contemporary efforts to improve them. One keystone of the

approach to research that we propose is to use existing efforts to reform/improve teaching and learning

to learn more about the issues above. These efforts can be treated as hypotheses about what will work,

what will make a difference.

Each of these kinds of reform is an opportunity to create a learning context for teachers, that is, a

context for learning practice situated in practice itself. We suggest focusing on what can be learned in

each setting about ways in which teachers are or are not able to use those contexts to learn to succeed in

teaching all children. In both “ordinary” settings and settings where substantial reform efforts are under

way, research is needed to investigate:

• what place learning a particular kind of teaching practice—namely, what it takes to teach all students

to achieve academic success in K-12 schools—has in the conception of reform

• whether practitioners are supported in reconfiguring what their practice is about

• what motivation/incentives for change exist in the teaching practices that are being learned

• where teacher learning takes place (in the classroom and not) and what pedagogies support teacher

learning

• what is effective across a teacher’s career.

In order to investigate these questions, researchers would need to:

• identify practices that aim to teach children and adolescents living in poverty and from ethnic, racial,

and linguistically diverse communities to learn powerful and usable academic skills, knowledge, and

dispositions
• develop systematic methods for investigating teaching practice and teacher development in reform

sites

• develop ways to represent teaching practices and useful concepts, frameworks, and language that

link teacher development, what teachers do, and what students learn in particular contexts

• create/design (experimental) sites where teaching and teacher development can be undertaken and

investigated in systematic ways that link teacher learning with student learning but that are not

possible to investigate in existing sites.

Existing sites for research could include:

1. Reform programs aimed at structural and cultural change in schools and systems. These improvement

efforts focus on various elements of the large structure or overarching culture of schools and systems,

on the assumption that changing global features of schools and systems will create change in teaching

and learning. They include changes in standards and incentives; changes in schools’ curriculum,

culture, and instruction; resource changes like class size reductions, fiscal supplements for high

poverty schools; and reforms in the professional culture and organization of districts.

2. Changes in the content and media of K-12 instruction that are intended to change student learning.

This set of improvement efforts focus on various elements of the instructional infrastructure of schools

or systems. The assumption seems to be that changing that infrastructure will create new

opportunities for teachers to instruct or/and for students to learn. Examples include new curricula,

new classroom participation structures, and new educational technologies.

3. Reform programs aimed toward changes in professional education across teachers’ careers. Reforms

intended to change teachers’ education and learning may or may not change teaching and learning in

schools. Examples include courses using multimedia materials and written cases to situate

professional learning in practice, professional development schools, and other school-based teacher

development programs.

4. Reform programs aimed toward changes in professional roles, responsibilities, and organization. These

may be intended to change influence, incentives, or professional culture and thereby to improve

teachers’ knowledge and effectiveness. Programs include local school restructuring; creation of

mentor roles; internal role differentiation (teachers who become part-time professional educators) in

both professional development schools and teacher research collaboratives.

Because few reforms are designed to link teacher development, teaching, and student learning,

researchers may also need to design experiments to test new hypotheses about how these practices may

be linked.
Take Account of What We Know About the Complex Relationships Between Research and

Practice

In the conventional model for relating research to practice in education, researchers produce

“knowledge” about learning and teaching (AKA “the knowledge base”), and teaching changes as

teachers put “it” into practice after they are taught “it” by teacher educators across the span of their

careers, from preservice to retirement. Given what has been learned in research about the nature of

complex practices and about the nature of learning, we reject these conventional notions about the

relationship of research both to K-12 practice and to teachers’ professional development.

Drawing on the analysis of how work proceeds in the natural sciences discussed in section II

above,113 we suggest that the possible relationships between the production of scholarly understanding

and changes in teaching and teachers’ professional development can fall into three categories:

1. scholarly inquiry that investigates phenomena for the purpose of producing explanatory understanding

(e.g., Bohr in science, educational researchers who observe and compare what happens when new

standards are introduced in different districts and create explanations of the variation related to

availability of resources)

2. practical inquiry that produces solutions to immediate problems (e.g., Edison in science; staff

developers who figure out how to use newly available classroom videos in teacher development)

3. scholarly inquiry that investigates phenomena to produce solutions to immediate problems, thereby

also producing an understanding of those problems and how they are solved (e.g., Pasteur in

science; researchers and teachers who work collaboratively to create a new cross-age organization

for instruction and investigate what happens when it is implemented).

As is discussed in Section II on Strengthening Research Capacity For Improving Education, the

relationship between research and practice needs to be restructured, this restructuring is particularly

relevant to the notion of strengthening professional communities of practice in teaching. Important

research on teacher development can be done at the level of building scientific theory, at the level of

practical inquiry, and in "Problem-Solving Research and Development Federations."

Attend to Teaching and Learning at Various Levels

Investigating the causal connections from teacher professional development to teacher learning to

teaching practice to student learning implies that we must pay attention, in all of these settings, to three

different levels at which teaching and learning occur:

• K-12 classrooms where students learn to do academic activities competently

• settings where teachers learn to do teaching activities competently
• settings where people who support the professional learning of teachers learn to do the activities

involved in teacher development competently.

Often we think of the problems of teaching and learning as situated solely in K-12 classrooms. But

our focus on teacher development requires us to pay attention to problems of teaching and learning at

these other levels as well. Because teaching and learning at the level of professional development have

K-12 teaching and learning as their focus, we must attend to them simultaneously. We are thus

concerned with three different learner populations and three different teacher populations.

• We must pay attention to a particular population of learners in K-12 schools (their characteristics

are given by our charge).

• We must also pay attention to the particular population of teachers who teach these students, in their

role as learners of teaching.

• We cannot ignore the people from whom these teachers can learn or those who will support them in

learning how to provide teacher development.

We are also concerned with three different “contents” to be taught and learned. (N.B. Context and

pedagogy matter within each kind; we do not mean to suggest that these contents can be generically

identified and delivered by teachers to learners. See section on context below.)

• In the K-12 classroom, the content to be taught and learned involves high achievement in reading,

writing, speaking, mathematics, the social and natural sciences, and the arts that are taught in school

• In the places where teachers learn their practice (i.e., professional development settings), the

content to be taught and learned is the activities involved in teaching the academic practices to K-12

learners (including the ability to perform those academic practices)

• In the setting in which teacher educators learn, the content is the activities involved in teaching

teaching practice to teachers (including the ability to perform those teaching practices)

And, finally, we are concerned with three different levels of organizational/ social/ institutional

context in which teaching and learning take place. How teaching and learning happen differs depending

on what is to be taught and learned.

• K-12 schools and classrooms where teachers and students negotiate what is to be taught and

learned and how it is done

• classrooms, schools, and school districts in which teaching, learning, and what is to be taught and

learned are negotiated by teachers and those from whom they can learn their practice (including

teachers learning by themselves, as well as learning from other teachers and resource partners)
• places in which teaching, learning, and what is taught and learned are negotiated by those who

teach teachers and those from whom these “teachers of teachers” can learn

The elements worthy of our attention at each of these levels are summarized in figure 2. By

portraying the “contents” of K-12 teaching and learning, teachers’ teaching and learning, and

professional developers’ teaching and learning as nested in this way, we must observe two cautions: (1)

The content that must be learned is not a static, generic package that can be delivered to each setting

and used there. At all levels, contexts and resources matter to teaching and learning. And (2) The roles

and people who enact them are disjoint. Teachers can be teacher educators or researchers, researchers

can be teachers or teacher educators, teacher educators can be teachers or researchers—the focus

here is on the different practices at each level and the contents of these practices, not on people and

their formal titles or roles.

Because we regard what students do in K-12 classrooms as complex academic practices and we

regard teaching as a complex practice, we must recognize that both school learners and their teachers

engage in some form of inquiry as they do their work. In practice, learning is active engagement with

problems, not passive reception of knowledge skills and dispositions. In the figure, who the learners are

and who the teachers are gets muddier as we move out from the center. K-12 teachers engage

simultaneously in teaching children and adolescents and in learning, and as learners, they engage in

inquiry—or research on teaching—as well.
those who 

support the 

learning of 

k-12 students 

as TEACHERS

achievement of 

academic 

competency

those who support 

the professional 

development of 

k-12 teachers as 

TEACHERS

k-12 teachers 

as LEARNERS

educators of those 

who support the 

professional 

development of 

teachers as 

TEACHERS

those who support 

the professional 

development of 

teachers as 

LEARNERS

k-12 students 

as LEARNERS

figure 2
IV.4. Conclusion

In this section, we have attempted to create a different vision of what teaching can be. It entails

taking responsibility for one’s own and the profession’s learning. We argue that educational research can

support this vision by:

1. Focusing on studying the practices of learning to teach and the practices of teaching, given what we

have said about what needs to be taught and learned.

2. Looking specifically at practices of learning and teaching this kind of teaching where the student

population is particularly underserved and where the learning goal is high achievement in reading, writing,

speaking, mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and the arts that are taught in school.

3. Formulating and examining hypotheses about how to make the learning aspect as it occurs in teaching

progressively productive -- how to arrange the activities of the practice in a way that either impedes or

supports continuous professional learning.

4. Investigating how there can be learning that improves practice in situations other than those in which

the practice occurs.

5. Clarifying what could be meant by teaching in and from practice in different types of activity that are

involved in the practice.

6. Investigating characteristics of teachers’ learning throughout their careers.

If we take seriously the notion that teaching is the kind of practice that requires systemic rather than

segmented knowledge for its improvement, and that acquiring that knowledge is the responsibility of

both the profession and those who inhabit it, we cannot limit ourselves to research on the effects of

improving teachers’ knowledge and skill on student learning outcomes.
 

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centers: CRESPAR and the Mathematics and Science Center at the University of Wisconsin. Although

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53 Elementary school projects included: Cooperative Mathematics Project: Number Power; TERC:

Investigations in Number, Data, and Space; The TIMS Project: Math Trailblazers; University of

Chicago School Mathematics Project, Elementary: Everyday Mathematics. Middle school

projects included: Connected Mathematics Project; Mathematics in Context; Middle-School

Mathematics Through Applications Project; Seeing and Thinking Mathematically: MathScape;

Six Through Eight Mathematics: Math Thematics. High school projects included:

Applications/Reform in Secondary Education: Mathematics: Modeling Our Workd; Connected

Geometry; Core-Plus Mathematics Project: Contemporary Mathematics in Context; Interactive

Mathematics Program; MATH Connections: A Secondary Mathematics Core Curriculum;

Systemic Initiative for Montana Mathematics and Science: Integrated Mathematics: A Modeling

Approach Using Technology; University of Chicago School Mathematics Project—Secondary

Component.

54L. Delpit, Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press,

1995.

55E. A. Silver & M. K. Stein, 1996, op. cit.

56For example, in Moll’s program called “Funds of Knowledge,” students with different cultural and

linguistic backgrounds contribute to each other’s understanding as they discuss literary and historical

issues from their differing perspectives and jointly write papers in their respective languages. L. C. Moll

& K. F. Whitmore, Vygotsky in classroom practice: Moving from individual transmission to social

transaction. In E. A. Forman, N. Minick, & C. A. Stone (Eds.), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural

dynamics in children’s development (pp. 19-42). New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. In

Brown and Campione’s program called “Fostering Communities of Learners,” students form research
 

groups specializing in different topics within the general subject that the class is studying and prepare

project reports that they then teach to students who have worked on different topics. A. L. Brown & J.

C. Campione, 1990, op. cit. A program developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter, called “Computer

Support for Intentional Learning,” provides networked computers in classrooms in which students

exchange information, questions, conjectures, examples, and arguments about the topics they are

studying in science, social studies, history, or literature. M. Scardamalia & C. Bereiter, Higher levels of

agency for children in knowledge building: A challenge for the design of new knowledge media. Journal

of the Learning Sciences, 1991, 1, 37-68. In the “Middle-School Mathematics through Applications

Project,” developed by Goldman, Knudsen, Greeno, McDermott, and others, students learn

mathematics by working on projects in design teams. J. G. Greeno & the Middle-Schgool Mathematics

Through Applications Project Group, Theories and practices of thinking and learning to think.

American Journal of Education, 1997, 106, 85-126. Many mathematics teachers and curriculum

developers have changed in the direction of having students discuss their ideas about conceptual issues

in mathematics and focus on each other’s mathematical thinking, e.g., D. Ball, Unlearning to teach

mathematics, For the learning of mathematics, 1988, 8, 40-48, P. Cobb, T. Wood, E. Yackel, J.

Nicholls, B. Triganti, & M. Perlwitz, Assessment of a problem-=centered second-grade mathematics

project. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 1991, 22, 3-29. M. Lampert, When the

problem is not the question and the solution is not the answer: Mathematical knowing and teaching.

American Educational Research Journal, 1990, 17, 29-64.

57e.g., L. Delpit, 1995, op. cit.

58J. S. Chall, V. A. Jacobs, & L. E. Baldwin, The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

59A. Atwell, A. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading and Learning (2nd

Edition). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998.

60A. H. Dyson, Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular, 1997.

61M Sperling, & S. W. Freedman, Research on Writing. In: V. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of

Research on Teaching (4th Edition). Washington DC: AERA, in press.

62e.g., K. Beach, (1995). Activity as a mediator of sociocultural change and individual development:

The case of school-work transition in Nepal. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1995, 2, 285-302. G.

Hull, M. Jury, O. Ziv, & K. Schultz, Changing work, changing literacy? A study of skill
 

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NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990.

63A. Lesgold, M. J. Feuer, & A. Black (Eds.), Transitions in Work and Learning. Washington, DC:

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64E. Tobach, R. J. Falmagne, M. B. Parlee, L. M. W. Martin, & A. S. Kapelman (Eds.), Selected

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65S. B. Heath, S. B., & M. W. McLaughlin, (Eds.) Identity and Inner-City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity

and Gender. New York: Teachers College Press.), 1993.

66M. Gibson, 1998. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 1998. H. Mehan, I. Villaneuva, L.

Hubbard, & A. Lintz, Constructing School Success: The Consequences of Untracking Low

Achieving Students. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

67D. Entwisle, K. L. Alexander, & S. Olson, Children, Schools, and Inequality. Boulder, CO:

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Academic Press, 1978.

68S. B. Heath & M. W. McLaughlin, Meaningful Measures: Learning in Youth-Based Organizations

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R. N. Lerner, R. N. (Eds.). Promoting Community-Based Programs for Socialization and Learning.

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69M. Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline..Cambridge: Harvard-Belkamp.

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70J. G. Greeno, & S. V. Goldman, S..(Eds.) Thinking Practices In Mathematics and Science

Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. S. V. Goldman, J. Knudsen, & M. Latvala,

Engaging Middle Schoolers in and through Real-World Mathematics. In: Mathematics in the Middle

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71J. Oakes, et al., 1993. op. cit.

72E. G. Cohen, Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom. New York:

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73H. Mehan.et al., 1996, op. cit. P. Gándara (Ed.) Capturing Latino Students in the Academic

Pipeline. Berkeley, CA: Chicano Latino Policy Project Policy Report, 1998.

74H. Mehan, et al., 1996, op. cit. S. Kagan, 1986, op. cit. R. E. Slavin, R. E. 1990, op. cit.. L. C.

Moll, C. Amanti, D. Neff, & N. Gonzalez, Funds of Knowledge: Using a Qualitative Approach to

Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory into Practice, 1992, 31 (2) 132–141. C. Lee, . A Culturally

Based Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching African-American High School Students Skills in Literacy

Interpretation. Reading Research Quarterly 1995, 30: A. S. Roseberry, B. Warren, & F. R. Conant,

Appropriating Scientific Discourse: Findings from Language Minority Classrooms. Journal of the

Learning Sciences, 1992, 2 (10): 61-94. L. Delpit, L. 1995.op. cit.

75J. Oakes, A. S. Wells, A. S., & Associates.. Beyond the Technicalities of School Reform. Los

Angeles: UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, 1996.

76In this document, whenever we use the term "professional development" we mean the learning of

teaching across the teachers' career, from preservice preparation through to the entire trajectory of

learning that occurs simultaneously with being a teacher in K-12 schools.

77 J. Brophy and T. L. Good. Teacher Behavior and Student Achievement. In 1986 Handbook of

Research on Teaching, Third Ed. ed. M. C. Wittrock. pp. 328-375. MacMillian Publishing, 1986.

78 J. Goodlad, A Place Called School, . New York: McGraw Hill., 1984
 

79 That point was first reported by Cooley, W., and Leinhardt, 197?, in the Instructional Dimensions

Study.

80For a review of these studies see L. Darling-Hammond, Teaching and Knowledge: Policy Issues

Posed by Alternative Certification of Teachers, Peabody Journal of Education, 67 (Spring 1992):

123-154.

81G. Fenstermacher, A Philosophical Consideration of Recent Research on Teacher Effectiveness, in

L.S. Shulman (Ed.) Review of Research in Education, 1978, 6,. 157-185.

82See Chapter 6 "Culturally Relevant Teaching" in G. Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful

Teachers of African American Children San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994, pp. 102-126. See also,

earlier work on effective teaching with non-white students by G. Mohatt and F. Erickson Cultural

Differences in Teaching Styles in an Odawa School: A Sociolinguistic Approach, In H. Trueba, G.

Guthrie, and K. Au, (eds.), Culture and the Bilingual Classroom: Studies in Classroom

Ethnography. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1981, 105-119; K. Au & C. Jordan, Teaching Reading

to Hawaiian Children: Finding a Culturally Appropriate Solution. In H. Trueba, G. Guthrie, and K. Au,

(eds.), Culture and the Bilingual Classroom: Studies in Classroom Ethnography. Rowley, MA:

Newbury House, 1981, pp. 139-152.

83Susan Stodolsky, The Subject Matters; Stodlosky and Grossman, and the Shulman, Richert, Wilson,

Weinberg, Grossman, line of work.

84Murnane and Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive

in a Changing Economy NY: Martin Kessler Books, The Free Press, 1996.

85 Ronald R. Edmonds, “School effects and teacher effects.” Social Policy 15 (Fall 1984): 37-39. And,

Ronald R. Edmonds, “Effective schools for the urban poor.” Educational Leadership 37 (1979): 15-27.

86M. Rutter, M. School effects on pupil progress: research findings and policy implications. In L.

Shulman & G. Sykes (Eds.), Handbook of teaching and policy (pp. 3-41). New York: Longman,

1983. M. Rutter, B. Maughan, P. Mortimer, & J. Ouston, Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary

Schools and Their Effects on Children. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. See also S. L.

Lightfoot, The good high school: Portraits of character and culture. New York: Basic Books,

1983.
 

87 See A. Bryk, V. Lee, & P. Holland, Catholic Schools And The Common Good. Cambridge:

Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993.

88V. E. Lee, & J. B. Smith, High school size: Which works best and for whom? Educational

Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1997, 19(3), 205-227.

89Mosteller

90For example, Y. Engeström & D. Middleton,(Eds.), Cognition and communication at work.

Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

91J. G. Greeno, The Situativity of Knowing, Learning, and Research, American Psychologist, January,

1998, pp. 5-26 building on H.A. Simon, The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems Artificial

Intelligence, 4 181-201 (1973).

92 M. Cole and Y. Engeström "A Cultural-Historical Approach to Distributed Cognition" in pp. 1-46

Distributed Cognitions ed. Gavriel Salomon, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Activity theory has

also recently been used specifically to describe what teachers need to be able to do in relation to what

they need to know, E. M. Guyton, Teacher Cognition, Constructivist Teacher Education, and the

Ethical and Social Implications of Schooling: Overview and Framework, in Strategies for CareerLong Teacher Education, pp. 1-10, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 1998. M. K. Stein, E. A.

Silver, & M. Smith. Mathematics Reform and Teacher Development: A Community of Practice

Perspectisve, In J. G. Greeno & S. V. Goldman (Eds.), 1998; op. cit. R. Gallimore & C.N.

Goldenberg, Tracking the Developmental Path of Teachers and Learners: A Vygotskian Perspective, in

F.K. Oser, A Dick, & J-L. Patry, eds, Effective and Responsible Teaching: The New Synthesis San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.

93Reviewed in C. Clark. & R. J. Yinger, Research on Teacher Thinking. Curriculum Inquiry, 7 (4),

279-394; F. Elbaz, Teacher Thinking: A Study of Practical Knowledge. New York: Nichols

Publishing Co. 1983, and C. Clark,. & P. L. Peterson, Teacher's Thought Processes. In M. Wittrock,

Ed. Handbook of Research on Teaching (3rd edition), New York: Macmillan: 1986.

94M. Huberman The Model of the Independent Artisan in Teachers' Professional Relations, in J.W.

Little and M.W. Mc Laughlin. NY: Teachers College Press, 1993, pp. 11-50.

95 E. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
 

96Murnane and Levy make this argument based on studies of how employees learn in contemporary

problem-solving-oriented workplaces.

97See M. Lampert and D. Ball, Teaching, Multimedia, and Mathematics New York: Teachers

College Press, 1998 for a start on analyzing what it takes to learn to acquire and use knowledge in

teaching.

98 J. W. Little, . Norms of collegiality and experimentation: Workplace conditions of school success.

American Educational Research Journal, 1982 19 (3) , 325-340. In a study of six elementary and

secondary school staffs, researchers found that the more successful schools (Success was defined on

the basis of aggregate standardized achievement scores over a three-year period in reading, language

arts, and mathematics, as well as through a peer nomination procedure.)had well-established norms of

collegiality and experimentation. Drawing upon methodological resources from ethnography and

sociolinguistics, these researchers were able to construct sets of descriptive statements that

characterized the practices and culture of each school. While there were variations among individual

teachers in any single building, the researchers found prevailing patterns of approved and disapproved

interaction in each school. For example, lending and borrowing materials as well as occasionally asking

for advice was acceptable in all buildings. Advocating the adoption of a new idea, however, was

acceptable in just four of the schools and was actively encouraged in only one. J. W. Little, Teachers’

professional development in a climate of educational reform. Educational Evaluation and Policy

Analysis, 1993, 15 (2), 129-151.

99B. Showers & B. Joyce The Evolution of Peer Coaching Educational Leadership, 1996 53(6), 12-

16.

100Wideen, et al in Review of Educational Research, 1998.

101M. Lampert, & C. Clark, C. Expert knowledge and expert thinking in teaching: A reply to Floden

and Klinzig. Educational Researcher, 1990, 19(4), 21-23, 42, C. Clark, & M. Lampert (. The study

of teacher thinking: Implications for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 1986, 37 (5),

27-31. J.P.A.M. Kessels and F.A.J. Korthagen, The relationship between theory and practice: Back

to the classics Educational Researcher, 1996 25 3, pp. 17- 22.

102Connecting knowing and doing in practice has been called deliberate action. by M. Kennedy in

Establishing Professional Schools for Teachers, pp. 63-80 in Professional Practice Schools: Linking

Teacher Education and School Reform, Marsha Levine, editor New York: Teachers College Press,
 

1992. Deliberate action, like the application of technical skills, the application of concepts and

principles, and the capacity for critical analysis is considered a mark of professional expertise.

103See H. H. Harrington and K. Quinn-Leering, Considering Teaching's Consequences, Teaching and

Teacher Education, in press; H. H. Harrington, Teaching and Knowing, Journal of Teacher

Education, May-June, 1994, Vol. 45, No. 3. pp. 190-198; and H. H. Harrington, Fostering Reasoned

Decisions: Case Based Pedagogy and The Professional Development of Teachers, Teaching and

Teacher Education, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 203-214 for both empirical and philosophical evidence about

ways of knowing for teaching and what preservice teachers bring to their professional education.

104L. Paine, and L. Ma, Teachers working together: A dialogue on organizational and cultural

perspectives of Chinese teachers. International Journal of Education Research, 1993 19 (8):675-

697.

105A. E. Beaton, M. O. Martin, I. V. S. Mullis, E. J. Gonzalez, T. A. Smith, & D. L. Kelly, .

Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years: IEA's Third International Mathematics

and Science Study (TIMSS). Chestnut Hill, MA: TIMSS International Study Center, Boston College,

1996.. A. E. Beaton, M. O. Martin, I. V. S. Mullis, E. J. Gonzalez, T. A. Smith, & D. L. Kelly,

(1996). Science Achievement in the Middle School Years: IEA's Third International Mathematics

and Science Study (TIMSS). Chestnut Hill, MA: TIMSS International Study Center, Boston College,

1996. C. Kinney C. Teachers and the teaching profession in Japan, pp. 183-253. In The Educational

System in Japan: Case Study Findings. Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1998. U.

Milotich, U. Teachers and the teaching profession in Germany, pp. 295-379. In The Educational

System in Germany: Case Study Findings. (draft volume). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center

for Human Growth and Development, 1996.

106C. Kinney, 1998, op. cit. pp. 204-205.

107H. Stevenson & R. Nerison-Low, To Sum It Up: Case Studies of Education in Germany, Japan,

and the United States. (draft volume). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Human Growth

and Development, 1997,. p. 118.

108 See, for example, F. M. Newmann, & G. G. Wehlage. Successful school restructuring: A report

to the public and educators. Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools., University of

Wisconsin-Madison, 1995. U.S. Department of Education, OERI. R117Q00005-95.
 

109V. Lee & J. Smith, Collective responsibility for learning and its effects on gains in achievement and

engagement for early secondary school students. American Journal of Education, 1996, 104(2),

103-147. J. Talbert, Boundaries of teachers' professional communities in U.S. high schools: Power and

precariousness of the subject department. In L. S. Siskin & J. W. Little (Eds.), The subjects in

question: Departmental organization and the high school (pp. 68-94). New York: Teachers

College Press, 1995.

110 V. Lee & J. Smith, 1996, op. cit. This study uses NELS:88 data to estimate predictors of students’

8

th-10th grade learning gains. It provides evidence that affective ties among staff members directly

predicts teachers’ commitment and indirectly predicts students’ achievement. V. Lee, J. Smith & R. G.

Croninger, How high school organization influences the equitable distribution of learning in mathematics

and science. Sociology of Education,1997, 70: 128-50. The study provides important documentation,

using a national sample, that teacher community promotes equity in student learning outcomes. A

“collective responsibility for learning” measure is a significant negative predictor of the slope between

SES and achievement gains, as well as a positive predictor of learning gains. These findings hold up for

8

th-10th grade gains and 10th-12th grade gains, with controls for average school SES, minority

enrollment, school type (Catholic, independent, public) and size, and measures of the academic

organization of the program and structure of the school.

111 See Little, 1990; Rosenholtz, 1986; and McLaughlin & Talbert, in press; also Feiman-Nemser &

Floden, 1985; Nias, 1989; Talbert & McLaughlin, 1994; McLaughlin, 1994, Darling-Hammond &

McLaughlin, 1995. However, for an argument that research has over-emphasized “strong ties” among

teachers, see Avila de Lima, 1998. Avila de Lima argues that researchers should attend more fully to

limitations of strong ties (e.g., insularity) and to the possibilities for flexibility and adaptability that reside

in certain kinds of “weak ties” among colleagues.

112 V. Lee & J. Smith, 1996; op. cit.McLaughlin & Talbert, in press, op. cit.

113D. E. Stokes, 1997, op. cit.