Relevance to Practice as a Criterion for Rigor

Abstract

When Congress passed and the president signed the Education Sciences Reform Act in 2002, it called for scientifically based research that would "apply rigorous, systematic, and objective methodology to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs" p. 116). That same year, the National Research Council (2002) produced a report and Educational Researcher published a related article, "Scientific Culture and Education Research" (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002), written by several of the report's authors. There is much with which we agree in both of the publications. However, there was and still remains a concern from the field about the narrow set of criteria used to define rigor. Erickson and Gutiérrez (2002) questioned the publications' call for a "scientific culture" that prescribed and relied primarily on "gold standard" random assignment studies of program effects as the remedy for the failures of education research to offer credible guidance for policy and practice. As we (Erickson & Gutiérrez, 2002) argued then, rigor in studies that aim to draw causal inferences about policies, programs, and practices requires in-depth qualitative research. In particular, scientifically rigorous research on what works in education requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document not only "what happens" (cf. National Research Council, 2002) but also how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts.Today, we see even greater need for the field to take up broader questions about what works to include questions about a study's relevance to transforming practice. Studies of "what works" should be concerned with the specific mechanisms by which outcomes for teachers and students are accomplished within specific structural and ecological circumstances. Rigorous research on "what works" also must take up seriously the questions, "Who does the design and why?" (Engeström, 2011, p. 3), "How can practice and research inform one another?" "What are the unintended consequences of change?" and, importantly, "Who benefits?" (Erickson & Gutiérrez, 2002;Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010;O'Connor & Penuel, 2010). For us, consequential research on meaningful and equitable educational change requires a focus on persistent problems of practice, examined in their context of development, with attention to ecological resources and constraints, including why, how, and under what conditions programs and policies work. New Programs at the Institute of Education SciencesRecently, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education created new promising programs of research that address important problems of practice and provide the time to build relevance into the design of research and development projects. 1 These and other IES studies have begun to incorporate more direct observation into research on policies and programs, in ways that have generated...

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