Preparing Teachers Building Evidence for Sound Policy (2010) / Chapter Skim
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2 Seeking Strong Evidence
2 Seeking Strong Evidence
Pages 21-32
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From page 21... ...
APPROACHES TO RESEARCH DESIgN AND EVIDENCE Much has been written about the problems of conducting research in education, specifically about the appropriateness of various research designs and methods and ways to interpret their results. In general, we are in agreement with the approach to research in education described in the National Research Council (NRC)
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From page 22... ...
The design and the delivery of teacher education are connected to outcomes for K-12 students through a series of choices made by teacher educators and by teacher candidates in their roles as students and, later, as teachers. Identifying the empirical effects of teacher preparation on student outcomes poses many 1 We note the progress that has been made in exploring causal relationships in education in new work supported by the Department of Education and in work synthesized by the What Works Clearinghouse (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/ [September 2009]
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From page 23... ...
in the observable data. As in other social science research, the challenge of developing convincing evidence of the causal relationship between the preparation of teacher candidates and the outcomes of their K-12 students places strong demands on theory, research designs, and empirical models.
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From page 24... ...
Researchers and policy makers in medicine and in many other social science fields struggle to design studies that yield dependable results when carried out in real-world circumstances and to make sound decisions in the absence of a clear or complete evidentiary base (see, e.g., Sackett et al., 1996; Murnane and Nelson, 2007; Kilburn and Karoly, 2008; Leigh, 2009)
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One would be to identify the teacher preparation programs in which math content is more rigorous than in other programs and compare the math achievement of the students taught by the graduates of the more rigorous program with the students taught by the teachers who completed the less rigorous math programs. However, without careful statistical controls, this simple comparison may well yield a misleading result because the other characteristics of teachers, their students, and schools that influence achievement outcomes may themselves be correlated with teachers' mathematics preparation.
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From page 26... ...
This is the challenge that often leads researchers to turn to various other research designs. Randomized and Quasi-Experimental Designs The strongest case for a causal relationship can often be made when randomization is used to control for differences that cannot be easily measured and controlled for statistically.
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From page 27... ...
Random assignment is also susceptible to other potentially confounding factors, such as when some parents respond to their perceptions about teacher quality by adjusting other factors, such as their own contribution toward student achievement. Also troubling is the challenge of accounting for the important individualized interactions that occur between teachers and students that lead to high student achievement.
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From page 28... ...
Thus these approaches work best when researchers have a strong understanding of the underlying process (in this case, both the content of teacher preparation and the other forces that shape the relationship between teacher preparation and K-12 student achievement) and can explore the validity of competing explanations (National Research Council, 2002a, p.
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From page 29... ...
Theory, case studies, interpretive research, descriptive quantitative analysis, expert judgment, interviews, and observational protocols all help to identify promising treatments and can provide important insights about the mechanisms by which a treatment may lead to improved student outcomes. For example, if it appears that stronger mathematics preparation for teachers is associated with improved math outcomes for students, there is good reason to broaden and deepen the analysis with additional descriptive evidence from other contexts and ultimately to develop research designs to investigate the potential causal links.
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From page 30... ...
For many questions, researchers are grappling with fundamental issues of theory development, formulating testable hypotheses, developing research designs to empirically test these theories, trying to collect the necessary data, and examining the properties of a variety of emerging empirical models. Given the dynamic state of the research, we chose to examine a range of research designs, bearing in mind the norms of social science research, and to assess the accumulated evidence.
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From page 31... ...
SEEKING STRONG EVIDENCE these initiatives have not been coupled with rigorous research programs to collect good data on these programs, the fidelity of their implementation, or their effects. Thus, although policy makers may need to make decisions with incomplete information, the weaker the causal evidence, the more cautiously they should approach these decisions and the more insistent they should be about supporting research efforts to study policy experiments.
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