A Research Strategy for Educational Improvement

An this paper I shall describe a re-search strategy1 that bridges the gap be tween r e s e a r c h e r s and practitioners. Krathwohl (1977) called for this kind of a strategy several years ago. The strategy has two m a i n charac te r i s t i cs. First, it is directed specifically to-ward educational improvement. Second, it is planned and carried out cooperatively by a researcher or a research team and the partici-pating staff of a local school. Successive research teams and I have been participating in this kind of improvement-oriented re-search for more than two decades while concurrent ly conducting other controlled experiments or carrying out longitudinal studies. Ideas and results from our current improvement-oriented research will be presented to illustrate an improvement-oriented research strategy. Before d i s c u s s i n g improve-ment-oriented research, I will re-view results from the National Assessment of Educational Prog-ress (NAEP) to identify trends in educational achievement during the 1970s. Next I will offer some hypotheses concerning the rela-tionship between educational re-