Usable Knowledge is a nice set of video and text resources for a large public from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Some examples:
In the section Learning and development, one can find domains such as Learning and the brain (featuring in particular Kurt Fischer’s programme on Mind, Brain, and Education), Learning by doing, Utilizing new and emerging technology.
But there is also a section about Decision through data, especially devoted to the idea of Evidence-based Education and to the problems of evaluation and evidence that are at the core of the What works in Education/no child left behind USA prograe for testable results. With a useful view on charter, pilot and traditional schools in the US. And a very nice “lesson” from Judith Singer adn Beth Gamse concerning the concept of randomized experimentation in schools:
“Over the past few years, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education has funded dozens of school-based randomized trials at the local and national levels. IES is also sponsoring a national effort (the What Works Clearinghouse) to survey the research literature and summarize the evidence on multiple education-related topics, giving the greatest weight to rigorous studies based on randomized trials. Many schools and districts, however, have declined to participate in these trials, and many in the larger education establishment have greeted them with profound ambivalence. Why does the mere mention of scientific rigor produce a level of animus among some educators as bitter as the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry?
Like many baseball coaches, many educators may simply lack the skills to interpret data for themselves. Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein makes critical decisions about his team only after carefully analyzing relevant data about his players. To evaluate a player’s performance, for example, he calculates the player’s on-base percentage, factoring in both hits and walks, rather than relying on simpler statistics like the batting average or the number of runs batted in (RBIs). In other words, he incorporates multiple indices to yield a more informative indicator. All educators can surely appreciate indicators that capture more complexity than one facet of performance alone. Yet many educators are not confident in their ability to apply these kinds of indicators in everyday decisionmaking. Or, they may be skeptical about the costs and benefits of the research necessary to yield scientifically valid results.
What does it mean for a school or district to participate in a randomized experiment? It means agreeing to try out a new program and allowing individual students, classes, or even whole schools to be randomly assigned to either the experimental program or the control group (usually, the existing program). It means exposing children in the experimental group to an untested program; conversely, it means that children in the control group do not have access to whatever benefits the new program might confer. It means carrying out a good-faith effort to implement the new program and participating in data collection to measure its effects-which means collecting data from all participants, both those in the experimental program and those in the control group.
Are education experiments ethical? Many educators assert that they are not. Some argue that random assignment unfairly deprives one group of children of new approaches or interventions that are potentially helpful, or, conversely, subjects children to experimental approaches whose efficacy is as yet undetermined. The counterargument is that a randomized trial is the fairest test of a program’s efficacy. Only this information can ensure that all children have access to the very best educational practices.
…Finally, still other critics assert that the interactive nature of teaching precludes it from being a “treatment” that can be randomly assigned. Following this argument to its conclusion, education, as a broad field of human interaction, is not an appropriate arena for experiments. We take heart in knowing that identical arguments were made when large-scale clinical trials were introduced in medicine after World War II—a time when medicine was seen as more an art than a science, much as education is today. Yet few among us today have not benefited from such trials, whether the lessons were positive (e.g., the benefits of an aspirin a day to reduce heart-attack risk) or negative (e.g., the increased risk of cancer associated with long-term hormone-replacement therapy).”