Can Randomized Trials Answer The Question of What Works?

摘要

A 120 million dollar federal initiative to improve secondary math education hopes to draw on an approach some researchers say may not be ready for the classroom. When Susan Sclafani and her colleagues in Houston, Texas, received a 1.35 million dollargrant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work with secondary math and science teachers, nobody asked them to demonstrate whether the training improved student performance. "All we had to do was produce qualitative annual reports documenting what we had done," she says. Sclafani thought that wasn't nearly enough and that NSF should be more concerned about whether the project helped students learn. Now, a decade later, she's in a position to do a lot more. And that's exactly what worries many education researchers.