Advancing Scientific Research in Education (2005) / Chapter Skim
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3 Building the Knowledge Base
3 Building the Knowledge Base
Pages 36-55
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From page 36... ...
The first of these workshops was designed to consider a range of strategies that might foster the growth of a cumulative knowledge base in education, including the development of common measures of key constructs, data sharing and replication, and ways of taking stock of what has been learned. During this first workshop, scholars from a range of fields also explored how the nature of scientific knowledge itself influences knowledge building.
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From page 37... ...
Replication involves applying The same conditions to multiple cases, as well as teplicating The design and including cases dhat are sufficiendy different to justify The generalization of results and Theories. In many of The natural and physical sciences, There ate professional norms dhat encourage data sharing a practice dhat enables verifications and replications and provides opportunities for investigating new questions,
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From page 38... ...
Research involving humans brings with it fundamental moral and legal respon sib i I iti es to protect their rights. These protections shape, and sometimes constrain, data collection, data sharing, and data use.l For this and other reasons, education researchers rarely replicate their work or that of their peers or reanalyze the findings of others using secondary data.
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From page 39... ...
Recommendation 5: Professionad associations involved in education research should develop explicit ethicad standards for data sharing. Data a e the foundation of scientific inquiry, and sharing them among peers is one direct way to facilitate the transparency, accountability, and scholarly communication so vital to scientific advancement (National Research Council, 2002)
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From page 40... ...
The underlying assumption of these efforts was that minority teachens would be more effective teachens of minority students because they could serve as role models, had higher expectations for these students, and would provide more positive feedback to them. In order to accomplish their hiring objectives, many school districts were providing financial incentives for their older, experienced teachens to retire, even in the face of a declining pool of minorities seeking to enter careens in education and evidence that new minority teachens were under-performing on teacher certification exams compared with new white teachers.
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From page 41... ...
findings included evidence that teacher's academic ability correlated with higher student achievement, and that a higher percentage of black teachens in a school correlated with greater academic achievement for black students but lower achievement for white students. Recognizing that these findings had considerable policy implications, Ehrenberg and Brewer cautioned that policy decisions should not be made based on evidence from one study alone.
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From page 42... ...
Thus, sharing data can facilitate growth in new areas of inquiry by allowing g oups of researchers to consider how others' data, measures, and constructs reinforce, call into question, extend, or refute their own, enabling collaborative thinking and advances in investigating phenomena such as learning processes—that require in-depth contextual analysis and differentiation. One mechanism for encouraging and facilitating data-sharing and knowledge accumulation is the development of ethical standards for data sharing in the professional and scientific associations that represent education researchers and related social scientists (and reinforcement of those standards in the publishing policies of their journals; see Recommendation 6)
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From page 43... ...
Every IRB has its own policy on data collections and data sharing, and no single interpretation or set of guidelines has emerged. The historical focus of IRBs on informed consent and notification policies to protect The rights of human research participants is complex and widely variable (National Research Council, 2000)
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From page 44... ...
Developing strategies for maintaining confidentiality widh such data will require broad and creative effort, but is just as important a goal to work toward as The sharing of quantitative data. In promoting broader data sharing while ensuring privacy and confidentiality safeguards, The field can learn many valuable lessons from The experience of federal statistical agencies (e.g., The National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]
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From page 45... ...
Recommendation 6: Education research journals should require authors to make relevant data available to other researchers as a condition of publication and to ensure that applicable ethicad standards are upheld. Norms for data sharing in many of the physical and natural sciences are reinforced in their professional and disciplinary journals.
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From page 46... ...
For example, universities and departments could work to change tenure and promotion decisions so dhat They recognize efforts dhat promote data sharing as valuable intellectual contributions to The field; a singular focus on rewarding researchers for publishing in a small set of elite journals may not serve The field in The long run. Associations could lead an effort to develop standards and protocols for preparing data to be shared.
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From page 47... ...
In our view, attention is needed on how to encourage g eater use of existing repositories as well as The possibility of developing new ones for facilitating data sharing and knowledge accumulation in education research.
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From page 48... ...
When feasible, there should be links to appropriate data repositories. Ongoing discussions to promote such standards for methodological terms in particular within the international Campbell Collaborations can provide helpful guidance.
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From page 49... ...
In either case, systematic reviewing is unnecessarily laborious and expensive because hand searching and other ways of sifting through the "fugitive" literature are required. Another rationale for creating a single resource for researchers and consumers of research that contains information about ongoing work is that it could be a valuable tool for facilitating communication and collaboration among investigators working on similar issues and problerris and for expanding access to relevant research among consumers of research.
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From page 50... ...
Authors' names can be searched to identify potential reviewers by quickly allowing editors to view their publication records on the topic of a pending manuscript. Indeed, the power of digitized content is that it is flexible—innovative ideas for packaging and relating studies can be tried and studied at relatively low cost.
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From page 51... ...
nationalacademies.org/core/ Gary Natriello, Teachens College, Columbia University tion Educational Researcher, are free immediately and available around the world. Another example is the delayed open access provided by Teachers College Recond and the Nero EnglendJor~rnel of Medicine, which open access six months after initial print publication.
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From page 52... ...
Claims of research quality, he posited, are reduced by anything that unduly restricts the circulation of research, and this is becoming more a salient issue si nce access is declini ng i n many institutions d ue to the high cost of journals. Willinsky provided a demonstration of the journal management and publishing system that he has developed through the Public Knowledge Project.
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From page 53... ...
They have the motivation, he argued, but not sufficient context to interpret the research. Thus, the research support tool identifies, for example, that an article is peer reviewed; it also allows readens to readily locate related studies in the Educational Research information Center database, to help them see that "no study is an island unto itself." The system also includes links to other relevant resources associated with the author's keywords, such as FirstGov (www.finst.gov)
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From page 54... ...
The international Campbell Collaboration and The federally funded What Works Clearinghouse are bodh developing systematic, rigorous, and transparent processes for summarizing research findings and ways to communicate Those summaries to educators who can most benefit from Them. Many of The technical challenges associated widh creating These resources stem from problems in accessing and summarizing articles from scholarly journals to synthesize social science research.
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From page 55... ...
In sum, abstracts are critical to dhe information retrieval process for developing systematic reviews and meta-analyses to sift through and to identify dhe universe of relevant research. When These abstracts fail to contain basic information about The study objective, sample strategy, research design, and odher key features of research, any searching process becomes intensely laborious, slowing The work considerably.
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