Judging Research in Teacher Education

TLDR: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002) has led to subsequent changes in federal funding policies that encourage the use of a more quantitative approach to measuring cause-and-effect relationships between educational conditions and outcomes to produce generalized findings that can inform policy decision making as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002), introduced nearly 10 years ago, called for "scientifically based research" and "evidence-based practices." This 2001 legislation has led to subsequent changes in federal funding policies that encourage the use of a more quantitative approach to measuring cause-and-effect relationships between educational conditions and outcomes to produce generalized findings that can inform policy decision making (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002). Consequently, these government policies have spawned debates over what constitutes quality educational research and what direction the development of future educational research should take. (1) In this editorial, we examine the questions of "What is quality research?" and "How can we judge it?" by referencing research in teaching and teacher education. We review briefly the landscape and characteristics of research in teacher education. Then, using the National Research Council's (NRC; 2002) guidelines as a framework, we offer ideas about what constitutes quality research in teacher education. Lastly, drawing on our experience reviewing 702 manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) during our inaugural year as editors, we discuss some of the standards that we believe are important for judging the quality of research in teacher education. In doing this, we hope to stimulate discussions about how reviewers and editors evaluate research and how the reporting of research in teacher education can be improved. Traditions of Research in Teaching and Teacher Education During the short history of educational research, two competing approaches to inquiry into teaching and teacher education have emerged. Each importantly, yet differently, shapes the identity of teacher educators as researchers and their relationships with the outside world. During the 1960s and 1970s, teaching and teacher education research methods were heavily influenced and shaped by behavioral and social measurement in psychology (Zeichner, 1999). Much of the teacher education research on "process-product" and "teacher effectiveness" in the 1980s likewise derived from behavioral psychology in that it focused on how the behavior of teachers affected student performance and learning (Beattie, 1995; McDonald & Elias, 1976). These earlier research studies commonly assumed that causality was linear and unidirectional: the behavior of the teacher affected the behavior of students, which in turn affected student achievement (e.g., Doyle, 1977; Dunkin & Biddle, 1974; Shulman, 1986; Zeichner, 1999). As the field evolved, the unidirectional conception of causality from teacher behavior to observed student behavior was modified to a bi-directional relationship (Brophy & Good, 1986). Nevertheless, the research designs that dominated this era were primarily quantitative and focused on establishing and testing theoretical assumptions about teacher behavior that could be generalized to various contexts of teaching. Research on how teacher education influenced teacher learning received relatively little attention prior to the 1990s (Zeichner, 1999). The behavioral approach that guided research on teaching and teacher education ultimately had several important effects on research-active teacher educators' identity in academia and their political relationships outside of academe. First, it aligned teacher educators with scientists in academia where the status, prestige, and rewards of its members are determined by how "hard" the knowledge is that they produce (Labaree, 1998). Second, it pushed teacher educators to be professionals, like those in medicine, who produced and used specialized, shared knowledge that consumers of education relied on to make judgments about the quality of services they received (Sykes & Bird, 1992). Third, it positioned teacher educators closer to the powerful policy world in supplying reliable and verifiable information for furthering policy makers' agendas (Cochran-Smith, 2001; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005). …