Panel To Detail National Strategy For Research

By Debra Viadero

Washington

Two years ago, a National Research Council panel published a report sketching out the "big picture'' for a 15-year strategy to make education research more useful. Last month, a second panel began the painstaking work of filling in the details.

Over the next year-and-a-half, the newly formed Strategic Education Research Program, or SERP, panel will design an institutional structure intended to focus education research on a few important problems and manage large-scale, long-term work addressing those problems. The group, which met here for the first time July 13-14, also plans to draw up an agenda for research in two critical areas—student motivation and learning—to show how its ideas might play out in a specific field of study.

"In contrast to many other fields, from medicine to information technology, scientific research does not supply educators with powerful tools for improving what they do. But it could," the research council writes in its charge...