The University of California Educational Leadership Institute

The need to bring research to bear on the problems of educational practice has never been greater. U.S. schools face a number of critical challenges in the years ahead. Two of the most cited examples are incorporat­ing increasing numbers of educationally disadvantaged students into the educa­tional mainstream and preparing students for an increasingly competitive and techno­logically advanced work environment. In order to meet these challenges, a vari­ety of reform efforts are under way at the local, state, and federal levels.

Research should play an important role in meeting these challenges. Al­though some critics claim educational research has produced few findings that can be used or have been used to im­prove schools, others claim that research has made an impor­tant contribution, not so much in pro­ducing immediate applications, but in ''constructing, challenging, or changing the way policymakers and practitioners think about problems." The recent report of the Na­tional Academy of Education, Research, and the Renewal of Education fur­ther argues that "current efforts to im­plement broad-based school reforms without adequate research to guide the direction of change will fail."

This article was originally published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis by the American Educational Research Association and Journal Storage (JSTOR).