Today, increasing attention is being paid to the importance and rigor of education research, which includes data collection and case studies of teaching practices, student achievement, and education policy. The No Child Left Behind Act’s call for interventions based on “scientifically based research,” the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, and a flood of data on student achievement have raised hopes that education research’s day has finally come. These rising expectations have been coupled with an influx of sophisticated research designs, yielding a growing body of research that dramatically expands what is known in the fields of teacher quality, school choice, and reading, among others. Nonetheless, there is frustration among researchers and reformers that this research too rarely influences policy or public understanding, and is too often twisted by advocates to suit their particular aims. At the same time, changes in research institutions, technology, and research funding have upended the ways in which research findings are communicated, thus offering new opportunities--but also raising concerns about how research is monitored, evaluated, and consumed.

AEI resident scholar and director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess has commissioned eleven papers to examine how and why high-quality research influences policy, how research is used (or misused) in core policy areas, and how education research is consumed by key audiences. Please join us as AEI hosts a conference at which panelists will present their findings on education research and explore their implications for school improvement. Researchers and discussants will suggest how incentives and institutions can be altered to encourage rigorous research and its proper use, while recognizing its limits.