Advancing Educational Research Innovations and Impact:
Partnerships & Opportunities
Stephen N. Elliott
Professorial Fellow
Australian Catholic University
and
Arizona State University
Abstract
Background Context
Educational research covers a wide range of topics such as instructional practices, student
behavior and learning, achievement testing, classroom environments, school leadership, technology
tools, and many non-school factors. The number of variables that have a measureable influence on
the teaching and learning enterprise in schools and beyond are large and the methods for studying
these variables diverse. Thus, no single individual or group of researchers can successfully address
key education questions alone – partnerships are needed!
Many people believe schools, teachers, and students can and should achieve more. And
many voices are calling for innovations that impact teaching, learning, and translate into
measureable improvements in students’ post-educational lives and the communities they live in. A
research product or program can be defined as "innovative" if it (1) improves significantly on the
current status quo and (2) ultimately reaches scale, thus serving a meaningful percentage and large
numbers of the population over time.
I am excited by the prospects of achieving more and believe as an educational researcher, I
have a role in the advancement of the teaching and learning enterprise that goes on daily in
schools. I also find the innovation process exciting and rewarding. For the past 7 years, I have been
involved in the development and leadership of Learning Sciences Institutes at Vanderbilt University
and Arizona State University. These Learning Science Institutes were designed as university-wide
initiatives to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers and to provide support for
investigators who conduct externally-funded research on learning, the conditions and behaviors that
influence it, and innovations that can maximize it.
Grand Challenges
We have some real challenges in education, and like the engineering profession a few years
ago, I think it is valuable to identify our grand challenges with the goal of doing so a way to stimulate
collaboration amongst researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. I realize there is not been a
list of grand challenges developed for education, but why not? Allow me to suggest some
challenges as a way to stimulate your thinking and possible move us to action. Here are six for
starters:
• Delivering math and science instruction that is engaging and advances deeper
understanding (i.e., knowing, knowing about knowing, and knowing how to know) for
students with varying skills.
• Developing all students’ social and communication skills to high levels within the
constraints of a 1,200 hour school year.
• Managing learning time so all students spend at least 1,000 hours actively engaged in
learning during the school year.
•
Creating and implementing instructionally relevant and embedded assessments that
yield results that can be used intelligently tomorrow to guide instruction and document
progress.
• Providing teachers training and job-embedded professional development so they can
be applied learning scientists and highly effective users of technology that supports
individualized instruction.
• Developing school leaders who are applied learning scientists and outcome driven.
I welcome your reactions to this list and encourage us to create a better list, more sensitive
to Australia and the K-12 catholic education system. Let’s engage with educators, parents, students,
and business colleagues to create grand challenges that will stimulate use-inspired research for the
next decade!
Opportunities and Impact
ACU is a knowledge generation enterprise and change agent, creating opportunities for
educational researchers to collaborate and generate new knowledge, tools, and methods for
advancing education. A vision for these research collaboration activities comes in the form of ACU’s
deliberate push for research intensification as part of its Futures Project, where researchers,
scholars, policy makers, and practitioners can collaborate and share evidence-based knowledge
and solutions that improve learning and quality of formal and informal education for all people. Core
values that guide this institute should include (1) develop expertise, (3) build collaborative teams, (4)
conduct use-inspired research, (4) think next innovation, and (5) achieve excellence with impact.
To operationalize this collaborative work, one must understand the partners and their roles.
Figure 1 summarizes key aspects of an effective education innovation cluster.
Figure 1. Research partners and their roles.
Effective research partnerships require communication, researchers motivated to
address grand challenges, and support. I am looking forward over the next several years to join the
ACU team to build effective research partnerships that visible impact education in Australia while
also generating new knowledge and innovations that can be used beyond Australia.
My Research Interests
I consider myself an educational psychologist with 30+ years of experience in the design and
measurement of educational performance measures. I am particularly interested in the relationship
among school leadership, effective teaching, and student performance (both social and academic).
My funded research has focused on scale development and educational assessment practices. In
particular, (a) the assessment of children's social skills and academic competence, (b) the design
and use of testing accommodations and alternate assessment for evaluating the academic
performance of students with disabilities for educational accountability, and (c) the measurement of
students’ opportunities to learn the intended curriculum. I have co-authored measures such as the
Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) and its revision the Social Skills Improvement System (SSiS),
the most widely used social behavior assessments in the English-speaking world. Along with
Vanderbilt colleagues, I also designed and validated two online assessments: the Vanderbilt
Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) to evaluate the performance of principals and
their influence on students’ achievement and My instructional Learning Opportunity Guidance
System (MyiLOGS), a teacher self-report tool for measuring the multi-dimensional construct of
opportunity to learn.
I am a big believer that better measurement of students’, teachers’, and school leaders’
knowledge and skills is fundamental to the advancement of the science of learning and schooling. I
welcome opportunities to partner with some of my new ACU colleagues and to share insights into
the research enterprise that can advance our collective work and the stature of ACU in the
educational research arena.