Can Research Actually Be Practical, Not Just Publishable?

When Tara Nicola, Ed.M.'20, Ph.D.'23, begins her research, she intentionally keeps something important in mind: The work will be most useful if it gets into the hands of those who really need it. 

“I’m driven by research questions that are rooted in actual problems of practice that need to be solved by practitioners,” she says. “A big goal of mine is to produce findings that actually get back to practitioners. People often don’t have access to research or to journal articles.”

It’s a goal that Nicola is already meeting. In the past, her research has included helping schools build counseling programs that are not just bigger, but better for student needs. She also analyzed high school recommendation letters and came up with ways for schools to revamp what’s written to make the letters more equitable for college-bound students. 

Nicola’s latest research tackles how to better support school counselors in producing school profiles — an often overlooked but important document that students include with their college applications and admissions officers use to evaluate students who apply. 

“Research on school profiles in a journal is meaningless,” she says, “if the people who actually create the profiles and interact with them can’t read the research.” 

One way that she’s getting the work out there, especially to school counselors across the country, is by partnering with Making Caring Common (MCC) and their new School Profile Project. 

“When I first saw Dr. Nicola’s research on school profiles, I knew I wanted to collaborate right away,” says Trisha Ross Anderson, MCC’s college admissions program director. “Not only was the work critical to improving holistic review and equity in admissions, but her research was practical and immediately actionable. Almost all of Dr. Nicola’s research-based suggestions of factors to include in the profile were things that counselors could include if they knew that these factors greatly mattered to admission decisions.” 

Based on Nicola’s work, MCC is offering free online editable templates, advice from counselors on approaching challenges, specifics on what should be included, and sample school profiles. In September, MCC offered two profile webinars for school counselors. 

Nicola first learned about the need for schools to rethink their school profiles when she was part of the research team at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, just before she started as a student at the Ed School a few years ago.

“We collected profiles from all different high schools across the country,” she says. “That was my first foray into looking at profiles and I was just shocked at the disparities across them. You’ll have profiles that are five or six pages long, professionally designed, beautiful works of art. And then I had one from a school that was barely a page with Microsoft clip art. I didn’t even know that clip art was still in existence. It was shocking that both of these were being submitted to colleges.” Unfortunately, she realized, “no one was really paying much attention to school profiles beyond the admissions folks who were reading them on a daily basis.” 

Part of the problem is that high school counselors don’t have access to all the data they need to write stronger profiles, or they don’t have the time or bandwidth. But Nicola says high schools need to realize that their school profile is important because it provides colleges with critical behind-the-scenes information. 

“The school profile helps colleges understand the context behind a student’s grades, to be able to better interpret the transcript, and also just other portions of the student’s application,” she says. 

A basic profile usually includes a description of coursework offered and student demographics, like school size. Most are missing the more in-depth information that can put a student’s experience and environment into context. For example, a deeper profile might explain that the school doesn’t have money to fund afterschool clubs, which could explain why a student applicant isn’t listing extracurricular activities. Noting that a high school is in a remote rural area “can be helpful to the admissions reader to know that the school actually is isolated from potential opportunities for the student,” Nicola says. Explanations around course limitations or rules set by district policies also help with context. “Your school can have 20 AP courses, but if you limit students to only taking four APs, then your students can really only take four,” she says. 

Of course, she says, school profiles don’t need to be super long. 

“I have talked with a lot of admissions folks over the years and from my conversations with them, including as part of the study, they didn’t necessarily want a five- or six-pager,” she says. “They’re normally going into these documents to look for very specific pieces of information. They want to be able to find it quickly.” 

Thinking about her work moving forward, Nicola says she plans on continuing to put out research that is publishable and practical, especially with her new job as a senior data scientist with the nonprofit Common App organization.

“The Common App has been building out its research team over the past year and is really interested in expanding the amount of public-facing work that we’re able to share,” she says. “We have all the data from many years that students submit, that counselors submit, and that teachers submit.” 

The goal is to make more of that data digestible, and not just to the guidance counselors and college enrollment managers who typically work with the organization, but also to students, parents, and others who visit the Common App website and want to learn about the admissions process. 

Does she ever imagine turning all of her usable research into a usable book? 

“A book is a possibility for the future,” she says. “There’s just so much appetite for this sort of usable information that additional work is necessary, but I think it would be very appreciated within the field.”