How to conduct research and release results to raise good education issues to a broad audience?

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) was successful in getting the attention of Congress, education researchers, school district administrators, and teachers of science and mathematics toward curriculum and achievement in science and mathematics. It has been a rallying flag that called attention to a national need and call to researchers to focus on curriculum. Love it or hate it, agree or disagree, TIMSS had impact on added knowledge, policy direction, direction of the research community, and secondary impacts. What might we learn from the experience with TIMSS that has implications for education research generally about having impact on knowledge, policy, or practice?

Our discussion could follow these questions:

1. What made TIMSS have the impact it received? Are education researchers too insulated from broad policy issues?
2. What kind of impact is desirable? Where do high-impact studies fit into the ecosystem of all education research? Why does other seemingly important and well done research seem to have little or no impact?
3. If we know what kind of impact we want, when, and by whom, how do we make that happen? Discuss roles of investigators, institutions, and funding agencies in making education research have the right kind of influence.

Discussion of the TIMSS experience.

Some observations by Schmidt who was involved in planning and releasing the results of TIMSS.

1. Studies need to address controversial political issues to receive national press attention.
   
   Not all international studies receive national press attention. For example, the 1999 "Benchmarking" study of TIMSS which showed the ranking of states and districts within an international framework did not obtain much attention even though a national press release was organized and well attended by major newspapers. The 1995 TIMSS study received more attention because it addressed the relationship between curriculum and achievement at a time when national standards were under discussion. TIMSS data were released in 4 segments: first the results of curriculum analysis that led to the mile-wide-inch-deep hypothesis; second the 8th grade ranking was released with information about classrooms in the U.S. as seen by video; third the 4th grade results showed that the U.S. was not always ranked low and thus that U.S. students dropped in ranking as they aged; fourth, the twelfth grade results showed that our best students ranked below other students, thus directly engaging a myth created by the first international studies in 1967.
   
   
2. Planning is a necessary but not a sufficient for good press coverage. Professional groups were involved in planning TIMSS press events and in giving Principal Investigators training on presentation.
   
   
3. Studies need to address new issues to receive national news coverage. The national press will ignore those that repeat previous findings. Without following fads and fashions, what are some good study topics that would be successful in furthering knowledge about education and would be a good candidate for affecting discussion in policy circles?
   
   
4. Where is the literature on how to create research topics that are of value to the discipline as a whole?