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Shattuck Professor Catherine Snow served as Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) initiative. The committee was charged with proposing a design for an organization that would carry out educational research in concert with universities and school districts. The committee completed its report and presented its recommended design at the American Educational Research Association in April 2003.
Q: Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, cites a similarity between SERP and the Human Genome Project. Can you briefly explain why this analogy works? A: SERP, like the Human Genome Project, would represent a concerted effort toward a well-defined goal, would require and encourage collaboration across groups of reserachers rather than the more typical competition, and could open up myriad possibilities for the improvement of practice. Q: What are some of the problems caused by poor connections between educational practitioners and researchers? How would SERP address—and solve—these problems?
A: The poor connections between practitioners and researchers have many resultant costs. Perhaps the most often cited is the difficulty of getting research into practice: well-meaning researchers generate ideas, findings, practices, and programs that are not optimally communicated to practitioners, and often not optimally designed for use in practice. I am also very worried about the difficulty of getting practice into research: practitioner wisdom about excellent practice, and practitioner worries, don't have enough influence on the kinds of problems researchers select and worry about. The establishment of SERP won't make these problems magically disappear—but it would create a place where researchers and practitioners meet as equals, it would open up schools to researchers in a way that is not now possible, and it would generate opportunities by defining problems from a central agenda, and then soliciting researcher and pracitioner responses. Q: Would SERP be able to make research findings and innovations more accessible to classroom teachers? What are the implications of doing so for the children enrolled in the school districts with direct ties to SERP? A: One challenge in increasing accessiblity of research to practice is to ensure the research is designed with an understanding of the issues of practice. SERP would do this. In addition, SERP would take on the function of accumulating knowledge, as well as disseminating it via the research networks and the collaborating field sites. Effective dissemination is not primarily a challenge of writing up research findings in a new way—it is a problem of creating a demand for the findings. SERP will be better able to do this than any current institution.
Q: Could fostering a relationship between research and practice prove to be distracting or otherwise detrimental for a school's students? A: Procedures will need to be in place to protect the rights of students, and to reap maximum benefit for current students as well as for future students from the research undertakings. Currently, students are subjected to a great deal of testing, but those test results often are not used in ways that inform teachers or improve teaching. Simply by increasing the informativeness of the procedures students are already engaged in, SERP would be able to enhance the benefits to them. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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Catherine Snow offers a perspective of how the SERP Learning Instruction Network might develop over time (5 minutes) 
