Teachers’ analyses of educational research as a source of professional development

David C Berliner, Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus, Arizona State University, USA For many teachers, research in education has a bad name. There are at least two reasons for this. Firstly, it doesn’t replicate well from school site to school site. Site variation is inevitably enormous, and thus research findings are affected by factors such as the experience level of teachers, the school’s demographic and the quality of leadership at the site. A research finding of potential import based on work at a particular school site may show smaller effects or not work at all at another school. The second reason research in education has a bad reputation is because it is hard for teachers and administrators to understand, filled as it often is with measurement formulas and statistics. This arcane language of researchers can render the useful and interesting parts of a research study indecipherable. In journals, researchers frequently report ‘significant findings’. But the t