| Read a Post for What Works? Teachers Need A “What’s Known” Clearinghouse | | | | Reply to this Post | | | * What's Known Clearinghouse is exactly on target | | Posted By: Brian Preston on April 8, 2011 | | | A wonderful description of a much-needed info source. How about a few IHEs getting together and supporting clinical professorships or post-docs who might scan the research environment and offer this kind of research summary? Publish on the web through a modest fee. Model this after the various digest formats in other fields. Or negotiate with the web and print sources where this kind of research is regularly posted or reviewed, and assemble the links? This isn't hard, and would be very, very useful. NEPC does this for ed policy research, but the critiques are largely methodological and include commentary about the biases of the authors that influence methods and interpretation of results. The work is removed from the classroom and not very useful to school practitioners
I've offered research articles to colleagues in K-12 regularly. In particular, I've been tracking the medical research on the brain and on learning styles that suggests the typical education applications simply do not reflect demonstrable evidence of how cognition or the brain work. But I offer links to whole articles, usually without commentary, and usually to an audience that is too busy to read the whole article or too locked into misinformation to consider topics objectively. Annotated commentary with links to the reseach, in a single location, organized in some categories that make sense to preK-16 educations, would be very useful and perhaps marketable, just like TC Record.
The fact that some large educational groups publish a lot of books on topics like applied brain research that don't match up to any solid research on how the brain works is also a leading contributor to the problem. An objective clearinghouse might help reduce the influence of these sources. |
| |
