Grants are a fact of life in higher ed. People who can write grants and get them funded are valued above those who merely engage in daily discourse with students. It’s getting harder to have grants funded because of the rules on defining “rigorous evidence” in educational research. Basically, it’s the medical “clinical trial” model. The reference document is a how-to guide for selecting interventions based on the quality of research behind them. Remember that NCLB REQUIRES that interventions be supported by relevant research.

First: The research MUST use randomized control experimental designs. This is not optional.

Second: The research MUST be done in at LEAST two schools, one of which is “similar” to the proposed application site.

What does that LOOK like when you’re trying to do the research?

As a researcher, I need to convince at least two schools that students should be assigned to a control and experimental group for regular instructional activities. The guidelines specifically indicate that lab-style applications are invalid and require that the research be done using “normal teachers.”

So, here’s a rub. If my intervention requires some students to be in the intervention and others not, then I have to look at some very limited application (like a homework or other individual activity) or I have to select the classroom as the unit of study. For a sample size that’s meaningful this means I’ll need to randomly assign at least 20 CLASSES of students to each group. That’s 40 classrooms of students who are all in the same grade studying the same material — randomly assigned so half of them use the intervention and half don’t. That means 40 teachers, 1200 students and a similar number of parents need to agree to participate in the study — 20 teachers need to be trained in the intervention and 20 need to be aware that they cannot use anything like the intervention in their classes. I’ll need signed paper from everybody or the whole thing goes down the tubes.

One of the grant competitions we’re considering is the annual IEP competitition looking at a participation intervention on the IEP process (basically developing the model of outcomes based on getting the right people involved in the process) but for a clinical trial model, we need to randomly assign a special needs child to an intervention or control group. If you believe that the intervention will make no difference, then this assignment makes some sense. But if you believe either that one is better than the other or that a given child might benefit more from one treatment or the other based on the child’s needs, then this whole idea of random assignment cannot be allowed.

Can you imagine getting the Human Subjects Review panel to agree on letting a researcher put special needs children through this process without regard for the child’s needs? Can you imagine a schools special education coordinator AGREEING with this process? Or a parent allowing their kid to be used as a guinea pig?

Where is the rationality here?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.