R&D in Chronically Failing Schools
July 5th, 2009
The Institute for Educational Sciences has a new grant call out asking researchers to develop tools to help school leaders turn around chronically failing schools. As is pointed out over at Inside School Research, the request for proposals is interesting in itself.
First, the call says it will not fund any “efficacy studies with group designs.” In other words, they are not interested in having this grant be about conducting randomized control group studies to show whether these things work.
Rather, there is language about a process of developing, testing, and refining. This is much more similar to agile design processes used in software. If I’m developing a new simulation tool, I’m not going to create a multimillion dollar tool in a vacuum and immediately put it out for randomized control group trials as my first evaluation of it. No, it would be much smarter to perhaps develop a “proof of concept” and get feedback on that, then perhaps develop a prototype and get feedback on that. On top of that, there still might be alpha and/or beta testing of a “production” product.
I’m glad to see a movement toward looking at the right research tool to fit the questions, rather than trying to use the same tool (randomized control group experiments) to fit every situtation. If IES is interested in developing new things, rather than gather evidence on whether existing things work, a develop, test, refine process is the right tool.
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