The Influence (or Not) of Educational Effectiveness Research on School-Based Decisions about Policy and Practice

Beginning with the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB) and reinforced by the "Education Sciences Reform Act" of 2002 (ESRA), the federal government established explicit expectations for the role of research in informing decisions about education programs, policies, and practice, and it also specified new expectations for what constituted research knowledge that was worth using. Unfortunately, it is unknown whether these changes have actually led schools and individual educators to make better and more frequent use of research to inform their decisions. This paper documents early results from a nation-wide study of when and how educators use research in decisions about policy and practice. To motivate new approaches to increasing research use and evidence-based decision-making in schools, the authors are conducting a series of research studies, the first of which involves developing and validating a survey to measure depth of research use by schools and teachers through collection of multilevel data from district staff, school administrators, and classroom teachers. In this paper, the authors present results from the first pilot of this survey with over 500 educators from 32 schools. The results presented in this paper focus on the influence of scientifically-based research and IES-funded supports for research use (e.g., WWC, RELs) on school-wide and classroom-level decisions about practice. This paper serves to highlight the likely scope and severity of the apparent divide between educators' decisions and the effectiveness research intended inform those decisions. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]