Center for Research, Evaluation, and Assessment
Research Unit
Research: Spanning the Divide
The Research Unit of NWREL's Center for Research, Evaluation and Assessment is focused on building bridges between educational practitioners and scientists who address educational issues.
These activities are aimed at making scientific perspectives and findings more useful and accessible to educators, and making education questions and issues more amenable to scientific investigation.
The Research Unit currently includes two primary strands of work:
The Research Unit designs and conducts educational research and evaluation studies, and provides a variety of research support services for our clients. We are particularly interested in projects involving experimental or quasi-experimental methods for evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions. We also provide services and consultation on a broad spectrum of research needs and methods, including:
- Research design, measurement design, and sampling design
- Grant-writing assistance
- Data collection and management, including online database development
- Data analysis
- Interpretation and presentation of findings
- Reviewing, interpreting, and synthesizing available research on specific topics
Current Research Unit projects include a large multi-site experimental evaluation of a model for writing instruction, a regional descriptive study aimed at developing better models of research and evaluation for educational technology efforts, an evaluation of technology-supported data-driven decision-making in a school district, and an ongoing series of project planning and design institutes for leaders of educational technology projects.
Many of our program and project evaluations combine elements of formal research, including experimental designs, with descriptive, correlational and qualitative mixed methods for formative and summative evaluation. A general overview of evaluation research and more information on specific evaluation services is available for those who are new to this kind of research.