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Improving the Performance of the Education Sector: The Valuable, Challenging, and Limited Role of Random Assignment Evaluations

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10438590600982236

1476-8364

Richard J. Murnane, Richard R. Nelson,

Youth Substance Use and School Attendance

Abstract In an attempt to improve the quality of educational research, the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has provided funding for 65 randomized controlled trials of educational interventions. We argue that this research methodology is more effective in providing guidance to extremely troubled schools about how to make some progress than guidance to schools trying to move from making some progress to becoming high-performance organizations. We also argue that the conventional view of medical research—discoveries made in specialized laboratories that are then tested using randomized control trials—is an inaccurate description of the sources of advances in medical practice. Moreover, this conventional view of the sources of advances in medical practice leads to incorrect inferences about how to improve educational research. We illustrate this argument using evidence from the history of medical research on the treatment of cystic fibrosis. Keywords: EducationMedicineRandomized controlled trialsResearch and development Acknowledgements We would like to thank Greg Baker for his research assistance and Patricia Graham and Catherine Snow for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Richard Murnane's work on this project was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. Richard Nelson's work was partially supported by the Merck Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.