Thomas Edison said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. He used the same concept for invention. It seems that a similar formula is right for research, which is what may lead to invention, which in turn may lead to the reputation of genius. To make things even less glamorous, much of the perspiration doesn't relate directly to the area of expertise in the research. A well-known example is Edison's (again) experiments with the incandescent light bulb. Different sources claim he performed between 6,000 to 10,000 experiments before he found a reasonable combination. Not fun.
Educational Research is no exception. There are many tasks that must be performed, taking up much perspiration and time, which do not have much to do with expertise in education. I am told it often happens that the prospect of having to do such tasks often deters Masters and Doctoral students from performing certain types of research. Society loses many opportunities to learn about Education. The good news is that some of these tasks may be outsourced: They can be done by someone else with no loss of integrity to the research. This is part of the mission of FIRE - to take as much of the overhead tasks off the shoulders of the researchers who wish to concentrate on their subject - education.
A few examples for such boring tasks that can be taken up by FIRE:
1. Validating questionnaires and other research tools
Designing a questionnaire is a professional task, and the researcher needs to make many decisions regarding what to ask, how, in what order, etc. But after the initial questionnaire design and before it is possible to use it with confidence, there is a need to validate the questionnaire: To make sure that the questionnaire indeed tests what it is meant to test, and that it doesn't test anything else, that it suits the intended audience, and much more. This requires considerable work, together with financial and human resources. To make it even more daunting, to be done well, this process may need to be repeated several times while changing the questionnaire until it can be considered valid. This is a potential deterrent for someone who just wanted to do research in education. FIRE can shoulder much of the validation work, though none of the design work.
2. Re-validating questionnaires to maintain their validity over time
Because the world is changing quickly, a questionnaire validated 20 years ago can’t be considered still valid. The group for which it was validated doesn't necessarily exist anymore. For example, if the questionnaire was validated perfectly for average-grade middle-income suburban Caucasian 6th graders in 1990 (having started the perfect validation work in the 1980s), the group disappeared, because average-grade middle-income suburban Caucasian 6th graders in 2010 watch different TV, roam the Internet being exposed to very different types of information and content than their 1990 ancestors; Their parents have very different work patterns and patterns of relating to the children; the climate at school is different, etc. The questionnaire needs to be re-validated for the new group whose description appears to be the same as the original one, but the Best-Use-By date is significantly different. The revalidating process may sometimes require changes in the questionnaire, for example, to update the language used according to the transient fashions of spoken language. FIRE can perform such re-validation, therefore maintaining the usefulness of the questionnaire.
3. Replicating new research to make sure it is… well… replicable
In strict scientific communities, a single research supporting or refuting a claim is not quite enough. The scientific community feels much better if the same research or a very similar one can be performed, which gives identical - or at least similar - results. This doesn't seem to happen very often in educational research. Maybe it's an indication that the educational research community doesn't take itself very seriously as a science. Whatever the reason, replicating research is not considered an interesting enough topic to get the funding and commitment from researchers. FIRE can encourage such replicating research by providing part of the funding.
4. Replicating old research to check if it is still valid
After a physics theory was confirmed by research to the satisfaction of the scientific community, the laws of physics tend to stay quite stable. There is no need to repeat the research again. In education this is not the case. Society changes constantly, and with it the attitudes, behavior, expectations and even abilities of individuals. For example, in 1939, Lewin, Lippitt & White published a study about “Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates.” This study is still affecting the thinking about teacher leadership styles. The study is over 70 years old. Shouldn't we suspect that our aggressive behavior patterns and responses to aggression have changed a bit since before WWII, with added television, ubiquitous news/drama, multiculturalism etc? We need to explicitly revalidate the results of the study by performing it again - in whole or in part. FIRE can encourage such replicating research by providing part of the funding.
5. Performing follow-up research
It is often useful to revisit an experiment or other research after a while - even years - and perform an extra step. For example, when checking the effect of a new teaching methods, the basic research may check students knowledge acquisition right after a lesson. It is interesting to check how much of that knowledge is retained after a certain period of time - say a year. So one would expect the researcher to perform a follow up step a year after the original research... But the original research is completed, the paper was already published, and the student who performed the research has graduated and is gone. There is no glory in performing the remaining step, and probably no funding. Too often, the follow up just won't happen. FIRE can encourage such follow up research by providing some of the funding or by other means.
6. Obtaining existing data from known sources
Much research can be done based on existing historical and background data, such as student grades, student socioeconomic background etc. Obtaining this data is not always easy. Problems range from legal issues, to privacy concerns, to garden variety bureaucracy. Fighting city hall is an unwelcome prospect to a would-be researcher - they didn't want to have a fight, just to do research in education. FIRE can provide "data extraction" services, with a complete umbrella of human relations, legal abilities, trust relationship and technical solutions to privacy issues (anonymization), and moral and political clout to encourage cooperation from those in control of the databases.
7. Obtaining existing data from unknown sources
Often, even if the data is assumed to exist, it is difficult to know where reliable data can be found. For example, looking at populations of immigrants within a larger established population may prove to be tricky. Which government or city office has the info? Does the info account for illegal immigrants? Does it account for the now-established children of immigrants? Does it account for less recent immigrants? Obtaining this data can deteriorate to the field of private investigation. Not part of academic education concerns. This, too can deter a researcher from tackling a research question that might otherwise be very interesting and useful. FIRE can provide data-location and evaluation services.
8. Translation. E.g., from Broken English to English
Sometimes sources for the research are written in a language not easily accessible to the researchers. Other times the desired language for publication is not easily accessible. FIRE can provide translation and proof-reading services.
... You get the picture. FIRE's Roadblock Clearing Catalog will contain many more ways to improve the life and work of the researchers.
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