Scaling Up Research in Teacher Education

Abstract

A recent report of the American Educational Research Association Panel on Research and Teacher Education confirms beyond question earlier findings exposing the limited utility of our research base in answering questions pertaining to policy or practice concerning preparation and licensing of teachers. Conditions accounting for this perplexing circumstance are described in detail by the panel, as are recommendations provided for overcoming them. A recent research project anticipating many of the recommendations led this article's authors to the view that several of the recommendations need added detail to be immediately helpful to the research community and that further recommendations Cochran-Smith and Fries (2005) referred to in the introductory chapter of the report as "the teacher education as a policy problem stage" in the evolution of teacher education research. Conclusions and recommendations reported by the AERA Panel are framed against the background of findings from several previous reviews of teacher education research from the perspective of policy (Allen, 2003; Lauer, 2001;Rice, 2003;Wilson & Floden, 2002;Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). CochranSmith and Fries (2005) summarized findings from these reviews as follows:Although there was some evidence that teacher preparation and certification had a positive impact on educational outcomes in some content areas and at certain school levels, the research base related to teacher education as policy was neither deep nor robust. Results were mixed in some areas, and there was virtually no reliable research in many other areas. . . . of teacher knowledge and behavior (Wilson et al., 2001), designs that capture the interactions among various aspects of teacher quality (Rice, 2003), designs that directly link aspects of teacher preparation to pupil achievement (Wilson et al.), direct attention to elementary and middle school teaching and in areas beyond mathematics (Rice, 2003), and data linking information about individual teachers to actual performance rather than aggregating data at the school or district level (Allen, 2003). (p. 96) Findings from each of the nine topical reviews conducted by the AERA Panel broadly confirm the findings of these preceding reviews, both with respect to relationships found between preparation and subsequent performance as a facilitator of learning in a classroom and in the focus and quality of research conducted.The dual purpose of this article is to outline a study recently completed that confronts many of the methodological and design weaknesses pointed to in the previous quotation and to report lessons learned from undertaking research that attempts to do so. We anchor our discussion in specific recommendations made by the AERA Panel for "scaling up" research in teacher education to overcome the many weaknesses cited in the Cochran-Smith and Fries (2005) summary. PANEL RECOMMENDATIONSRecommendations made by the AERA Panel for strengthening research on teacher preparation and its effects carry considerably greater ...

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