education research to promote such improvements. To carry out this task, the committee organized a five-part workshop series and published several reports on selected topics.

In this final report, we offer recommendations for improving scientific research in education, organized around three strategic objectives: promoting quality, building the knowledge base, and enhancing the professional development of researchers. This is a time of unprecedented opportunity for education researchers to initiate bold reforms. The enthusiasm—and angst—surrounding recent calls for “scientifically based research” can and should be harnessed to advance the field of education research. The time to act is now.

The intellectual predecessor to this report, Scientific Research in Education, was an attempt to articulate what is meant by quality with respect to scientific research in education. The definition is a combination of six guiding principles that underlie all scientific fields, along with several features of education that shape how these principles apply to research on teaching, learning, and schooling. We adopted that framework as our working definition of quality of scientific education research.

Recently, much attention has been focused on “upgrading” the methods used in education studies, with a particular emphasis on randomized field trials to help establish cause-and-effect relationships. Methodologies are the tools researchers use to do their work; their appropriate use is essential to promoting quality. However, matching appropriate methods to research questions is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ensuring scientific rigor. We conclude that the national conversation about methodological quality is but a part of a needed broader focus on how to define and uphold quality in scientific education research. Issues such as the development of theory and the use of replications to clarify generalizability are examples of aspects of scientific quality that are equally important to consider.

Our recommendations for ways to promote quality—broadly defined—focus on peer review systems in federal agencies that support education research, the implementation of research designs in school settings, and partnerships between researchers and school personnel.

Front Matter (R1-R16)

Executive Summary (1-8)

1 Introduction (9-18)

2 Promoting Quality (19-35)

3 Building the Knowledge Base (36-55)

4 Enhancing Professional Development (56-71)

5 Summary and Conclusions (72-80)

References (81-86)

Appendix A: Workshop Agenda (87-96)

Appendix B: Understanding and Promoting Knowledge Accumulation: Summary of Workshop Key Points (97-114)

Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Commitee Members and Staff (115-120)