How to Read Education Data Without Jumping to Conclusions (Jessica Lahey & Tim Lahey)
In an earlier post, I offered fundamental questions that parents, teachers, administrators, researchers, and policymakers could (and yes, should) ask of any policies being considered for improving classroom teaching and student learning.
In this post, a teacher and M.D. offer the basic questions that educators and non-educators should ask of any research study tweeted, blogged about, and appearing in newspapers or on TV programs.
Jessica Lahey is an English, Latin, and writing teacher in Lyme, New Hampshire. She writes about education and parenting for The New York Times and on her site, Coming of Age in the Middle. Tim Lahey, MD, is an infectious diseases specialist and associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine
This piece appeared on AtlanticOnline, Jul 8 2014
Education has entered the era of Big Data. The Internet is teeming with stories touting the latest groundbreaking studies on the science of learning and pedagogy. Education journalists are in a race to report these findings as they search for the magic formula that will save America’s schools. But while most of this research is methodologically solid, not all of it is ready for immediate deployment in the classroom.
Jessica was reminded of this last week, after she tweeted out an interesting study on math education. Or, rather, she tweeted out what looked like an interesting study on math education, based on an abstract that someone else had tweeted out. Within minutes, dozens of critical response tweets poured in from math How to Read Education Data Without Jumping to Conclusions (Jessica Lahey & Tim Lahey) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: