There is still a lot that is unknown about effective learning strategies, and implementing what is known in classrooms across America can be challenging for researchers and educators. That’s why federal research agencies are increasingly interested in "improvement science," which allows educators to quickly try out new interventions in various settings while still collecting data for researchers to develop long-term experimental studies. The goal is to involve teachers and principals in research earlier and ensure that promising interventions succeed when implemented on a larger scale.
Education practitioners have their own ideas about interventions that might work, but they lack certainty. There is a wealth of expert knowledge and research, but it isn’t being effectively utilized to support student success. As Congress considers reauthorizing the federal Education Sciences Reform Act, improvement science could provide new ways for researchers and practitioners to collaborate.
To facilitate this collaboration, networks of teachers and principals within school districts can work with researchers to address specific problems, such as improving student attendance. Individual teachers can test and refine potential solutions over short periods of time. For example, they might experiment with different ways of grouping community college students to boost attendance, or use classmates to track each other’s attendance. By pooling the findings of multiple teachers, researchers can identify the most promising practices for further investigation in controlled randomized trials.
Improvement science originated in the healthcare field, with hospital hygiene experiments supported by organizations like the National Institutes of Health. Now, the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences are implementing improvement science programs in education settings. Some educators are excited about this approach because randomized controlled trials often only provide a simple yes or no answer to a intervention’s effectiveness, without providing details on how or why it works.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, based in Stanford, California, is using improvement science in its Networked Improvement Community project. They are working with remedial math teachers at community colleges and plan to expand to middle schools later this year. The foundation believes that improving outcomes requires understanding the underlying processes and the connections between them.
In the experiment, educators promptly examined the standards and devised fresh instructional blueprints. "We managed to establish a link by illustrating how these standards surpass our previous state standards," she explained. "We have been equipping students with novel approaches, rather than merely urging them to make an effort."
