Best Foot Forward Project Director Miriam Greenberg reflects on education research and usable knowledge in the following HGSE Usable Knowledge blog post.
A challenge to education researchers everywhere: How is your work being used?
Last week, 15,000 tweed-clad attendees descended on Chicago for the annual American Education Research Association conference. They were guided by the twin mission of nearly every education school: to contribute to an ever-growing scientific body of knowledge and to make our teaching and learning systems better. In other words, education researchers came to share usable knowledge.
The breadth of intellectual production at the convening was overwhelming. At any given hour, there were 100 researchers at four different hotels presenting papers along the research-to-practice continuum. On the panel “What Vergara Hath Wrought,” HGSE Professor Susan Moore Johnson, alongside John Papay, Jack Schneider, and James Wyckoff, debated the role of research in the historic court decision last June and shared findings they believed should influence future decisions to help low-income students receive the best possible education. At the session “How People Learn,” panelists shed light on new research with the greatest potential to influence practice, particularly around cultural differences and similarities in learning.
Even as these sessions were unfolding, a storm was kicking up miles away, in the halls of the 114th Congress. Representative Lamar Smith and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology introduced a bill that would cut National Science Foundation funding to the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate (SBE) in half. SBE funds 55 percent of university social science research, including education studies. The bill would also add an additional layer of complexity to the peer review process and, according to the Consortium of Social Science Associations, send the message that the social sciences are not worth funding.
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