When Research Won't Work

Educational research doesn't travel well. Research that's been conducted in elementary schools, for example, seldom applies to secondary schools. In fact, it's a recipe for disaster to hand a high school or middle school principal or teacher a research report that's geared to primary school education. Yet, it happens all the time.

Why are there such significant differences between elementary and secondary schools? Organizational and communication research demonstrates that the size differential between the two renders them operationally different. The dynamics of interacting with 30 or 40 teachers in an elementary school are far different than working with 100 or more teachers in a high school.

Elementary schools usually aren't departmentalized, while high schools are—and as a result, there are more subcultures among secondary school teachers. Research shows, for example, that members of high school academic, arts, industrial arts, business, and athletic departments each have their own way of perceiving other teachers, the school, and their places in it. Elementary teachers also tend to be more child-centered than their secondary school counterparts, who are most often subject-centered. Elementary teachers tend to deal with the same students all day and engage them in a wide variety of subjects. Secondary teachers, on the other hand, exchange students every period and often teach a single discipline.

There are many other fundamental differences between the two types of schools. Elementary schools have a relatively standardized curriculum compared to secondary schools, with their mix of requirements and electives. Secondary schools also offer many extracurricular activities that compete with academics for students' time. Although these activities are designed to complement the academic program, they can overshadow it if they're allowed to—and often with parent support.

There are also developmental differences that need to be taken into account. Elementary schools serve children. Middle schools serve early adolescents. High schools serve older adolescents and young adults. Anyone who's ever been in a school or has had children of their own knows how different it is to work with an 8-year-old, a 12-year-old, or a 16-year-old.

These age and developmental differences provide a good example of the dangers of applying research done at one level to another. A report in the early 1990s, for example, reviewed all of the research on using cooperative learning as an instructional technique. The author found that the results of more than 200 studies had been published, but fewer than 10 had examined student learning experiences in ninth grade and up. And the results among those handful of studies were inconclusive in assessing the technique's merit with high schoolers. Yet, cooperative learning was pushed in high schools across the country for the better part of a decade.

The point of all of this is to say that time is too short, resources are too few, and improvement opportunities are too rare to run the risk of misapplying information. When you assist administrators and teachers in reviewing research on, say, scheduling, governance structures, attendance programs, student behavior management, school and community relations, or something as critical to a school's success as curriculum and instruction, make sure that the research reports and summaries (as well as the model program descriptions and opinion pieces) are truly grounded in schools similar to your own. If the materials you provide are sound, your influence will increase when your colleagues wind up with positive ends. But if the materials you provide are flawed, they will come back to haunt you, reducing the degree of confidence that other educators have in you.