Doctor Clare

We all want to participate in learning experiences that are exciting, interesting and effective. They’re the most worthwhile — and fun! — for students and teachers alike, but they can be hard to create, hard to maintain, hard to evaluate. Incorporating research-based practices can be a great way to solve these problems and see results in the classroom.

Why Use Research?

Research is ongoing. With each new study, we learn something new, either something that worked or something that didn’t. Current research is reflective of what people are saying now in a way that older ideas just can’t be. What we can do with technology to help students who can’t see or can’t speak is beyond the imaginations of our parents’ generation. What we knew about Autism 20 years ago pales in comparison to what we know now. Incorporating the latest research into our classrooms allows us to be at the forefront of what is know to be good practice. And even when a practice is known to be good and effective, it can still take quite a long time to trickle down to the public. Seatbelts were invented in the late 1800s but it wasn’t until the 1930s that groups of US physicians began testing them and advocating for their use in automobiles. Being familiar with the research and putting that into practice in our own classrooms can help cut down on lost time when it comes to implementing strategies that will work and practices that will save.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, “research-based” is the policy language of the land. The G.W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind stated that, “A primary focus of this law is the requirement that school districts and individual schools use effective research-based reading remediation programs so all children are reading at grade level by the end of third grade. (20 U.S.C.§ 6361)” furthering the expectation that research undergird all of our instructional practices. The Obama-endorsed Every Student Succeeds Act raised the bar, stating that research-based was not even enough; strategies needed to be evidence-based. Just the presence of the research methodology, and the efforts put into testing a method would not make it sufficient; it had to work! These philosophies are evident in our school climates today. People want results, they want to know that what they are doing is going to make a difference, and research can provide the structure and support to achieve.

How Do You Begin?

Using research in the classroom usually starts with a question. Sometimes this comes in the form of a problem: my students aren’t reading at grade-level, my students haven’t mastered their math facts; valuable instructional time is lost to behavior management every day. Once you have your question or problem identified, it is time to operationalize it. When a problem is operationalized, it is identified in the clearest, most concrete terms possible. What does “reading at grade level mean?” Is it fluency? Speed? Meeting a certain threshold of comprehension (as measured by getting questions right on a test…?) Once you have a clear and observable description of the problem, you can begin to look at what the research says to find a solution.

Where Do You Find Research to Use?

If you are associated with a university in some, as a student or alumni member, your access to the world of research journals can be a few keystrokes away. Log into your university account, or visit your university library, search by database (ERIC and PsychINFO are great resources for journals). A key word search of the database can yield hundreds of pages of results, so narrowing down to the most recent years, and peer-reviewed articles can help to identify which articles are useful from which might merely be interesting future directions for study. Similarly, Google Scholar offers the ability to search a wide variety of journals and turn up useful interventions. It offers the added metric of the “cited by” statistic; a higher number here indicates more other authors cited this source in their own works, an indication of its importance to the field. Of course, this is also dependent upon the field (some fields cite existing research more often than others as a matter of course), but anything in the double digits, especially if you are limiting your search to articles from the last few years, is probably worth a look. 

Still, even with all of this research available to you, and some mildly helpful indicators of quality, how can you be sure that you are identify the best research-based practices to implement in your classroom? There are databases for that too. Among the most prominent is the What Works Clearinghouse (https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/). A function of the US Department of Education, the WWC, in their own words, “reviews the existing research on different programs, products, practices, and policies in education. Our goal is to provide educators with the information they need to make evidence-based decisions. We focus on the results from high-quality research to answer the question ‘What works in education?’” A search of this resource allows you to find publications, compare programs and interventions, and ultimately choose the resources that will work best for your classroom and your students. A careful read of the study, or of the summary from WWC, will tell you about who developed this intervention, what the participants were like and how many of them there were, and what kind of results were found. All of these factors can help you to make the decision on what to use.

Tailoring Research to Your Classroom

Once you have identified your area of interest and some research-based practices to implement, there comes the actual matter of implementation. If you are choosing a packaged program, your intervention may be as simple as purchasing the program and following the manual to implementation (though even that isn’t necessarily simple, school budgets being what they are.) If you are using a new strategy that doesn’t come with a manual or script, you have more opportunities to tailor it to your classroom, which of course comes with the risks of unintended consequences. Striking out on your own in this way may mean that you don’t see results or, in the worst case, the problem you thought you were addressing actually are aggravated. But some preparation and tailoring of the intervention to your unique class and your unique needs can address some of these concerns.

Factors to consider include the age and grade of your students, the size of your class and the staff that is there to help, the school culture and attitudes towards discipline, and even outside forces like the socioeconomic needs of the neighborhood and presence of community supports. All of these can make a difference in implementation success, and so it is important to consider their presence (or absence) and the type of impact that is likely to have on your intervention. Consider the study or summary you read and who participated in that; are they close enough to your students that you can reasonably follow the study guidelines like a map? Or are they different in a way in which you might need to consider tailoring your intervention?

Once you have an idea of why the item or strategy you want to use might need to be tailored, you can consider how to do so. You may choose to tailor the materials that you use to carry out the intervention, making worksheets easier (or more complicated) through the problems that you choose, making tests shorter or limited to just one topic instead of covering multiple concepts. You may change the formatting of an assignment or lesson, using fewer items per page, depending on your students. You can also change the pacing or duration of an intervention, to make it last longer or change it up sooner on a day-to-day or even week-by-week basis. You can adjust the presentation procedures, incorporate stories, songs, and videos. Do a reader’s theater or actual dramatization. You can add manipulatives or subtract them, combine two types of graphic organizers into one. Once you begin tailoring a method, you will see that the options are truly limitless. Just remember to stay faithful to the original design, if not the exact form, or else what you are doing may not really be research-based after all.

Resolve and Repeat

The end of using research in the classroom isn’t in the doing, it’s in the evaluation. An essential part of implementing any research into the classroom is to evaluate the experience, make changes as needed, and keep going. Take data. Note how students perform before the implementation by looking at student grades, test scores, a quick sample test, or observation notes you jot down one afternoon after class. Look at this data again while you are implementing the intervention—any changes? If you can, look at it again. And then again once the intervention is over. If all has gone well, you will see a dramatic improvement in student performance, academic and otherwise. And if you do, don’t rest on those laurels; keep going. Stick to your intervention, and also dream up ways to make it better.

But even if you don’t see dramatic—or any—improvement as a result of your efforts, there is still value in the learning to be done! Develop a theory as to why you didn’t see results. Did something happen to put students off? Was there a misstep in the roll out of the plan? Was it just not popular with students and therefore hard to get buy-in? Change what you can and try again (taking data all along). Or, go back to your resources and get more ideas for research; add to what you have already tried. Sometimes it takes a combination to get results. Finally, consider publishing your results, yourself, as an example of action research. The work you do in the classroom matters, and it can help others in other classrooms across the country or the world.

When it comes to implementing research in the classroom, trying is success. You either get the results you want or, in the words of Thomas Edison, you find 10,000 ways that didn’t work. Don’t wait for the schools to hand you something new; we know that can take a long time. Go out and find the solutions that work for you. And soon you will be the one with the answers.