The federal government has not been alone in calling for scientific research into education. This call has been echoed in a series of reports and recommendations from the National Academies’ research arm, the National Research Council (NRC). In 1958, the NRC’s report, A Proposed Organization for Research in Education, recommended establishing a research organization for the advancement and improvement of education. A 1977 report, Fundamental Research and the Process of Education, called for fundamental research about educational processes. A 1986 report, Creating a Center for Education Statistics: A Time for Action, led to what many regard as the successful overhaul of the federal education statistical agency. And in the 1992 report, Research and Education Reform: Roles for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the NRC called for a complete overhaul of the federal research agency, criticizing its focus on “quick solutions to poorly understood problems” (National Research Council, 1992, p. viii). The report recommended creating an infrastructure that would support and foster scientific research into learning and cognitive processes underlying education, curriculum, teaching, and education reform.

What, then, warrants another NRC report on scientific research in education? First, as we argue above, the nation’s commitment to improve the education of all children requires continuing efforts to improve its research capacity. Questions concerning how to do this are currently being debated as Congress considers ways to organize a federal education research agency. Indeed, H.R. 4875—the so-called “Castle bill” to reauthorize OERI—has provided us with an opportunity to revisit historic questions about the “science of education” in a modern policy context. This bill includes definitions—crafted in the political milieu—of scientific concepts to be applied to education research, reflecting yet again a skepticism about the quality of current scholarship. (We discuss these definitions briefly in Chapter 6.) Our report is specifically intended to provide an articulation of the core nature of scientific inquiry in education from the research community.

The rapid growth of the education research community in recent years has resulted in the production of many studies, articles, journal publications, books and opinion pieces associated with academics, but that are not necessarily scientific in character. Moreover, the field of education researchers is itself a diverse mix of professionals with varying levels and types of research training, and they often bring quite different orientations