AERA Meeting Showcases New Ways To Present Research

By Debra Viadero

Montreal

In a hotel meeting room here at the annual conference of the world's largest educational research group, four actors are putting on a play. Garbed in black, they clutch their scripts and launch into their lines. The standing-room-only crowd watches, enthralled.

These "actors" are researchers, and they are using this unusual format to present real data from a qualitative study of parents' responses to mathematics reforms at a New England high school.

Novel ways of doing and presenting research abounded last week at the American Educational Research Association conference, which drew 12,000 scholars from around the world. Among the hundreds of sessions scheduled during the April 19-23 gathering were talks on research led by teachers; discussions on using autobiography, biography, photography, and emerging video technologies as forms of research; and presentations on "action" research, which calls on researchers to involve themselves in the...