Finding Relevant Research

Although researchers found that cooperative learning activities improve student achievement in all subjects and grades, that is not the case with all evidence-based teaching practices. It is important to determine if research findings are relevant to your classroom. It makes sense that effective teaching practices in early childhood education would be different from those in later grades. Best practices for teaching mathematics may be different from those for teaching science. Therefore, as you read educational research, you should always consider its relevance to your teaching and your students.

As a student in higher education, you have access to peer-reviewed research articles about education through your campus library.  You can meet with a librarian to learn how to search the database system available on your campus to find scholarly articles about specific teaching practices relevant to your classroom. Google Scholar also provides a means to search for published research studies.

Websites for professional organizations for educators also have information about findings from peer-reviewed educational research. Two organizations that report information about educational psychology are the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). There are also professional organizations for teachers of each level of education and subject.

Another valuable internet resource is the What Works Clearinghouse website. It is a federal government website about scientific evidence for teaching practices. On the website you can find reports about educational research that rate the value of the research findings based on the quality of the research methods used.

In general, .gov, .edu, and .org websites are more likely to have science-based information about teaching practices than other websites. Use your skills in evaluating the quality of internet sources when you find information about teaching. You will need to discern whether information you find on the internet is based on facts rather than opinions before applying that information to your classroom practices. Avoid using newspaper or magazine articles for information about teaching because they are not peer-reviewed sources of research findings.

Some researchers publish trade books about the areas of education in which they are experts. These books provide an in-depth summary of their scholarly work in a format easily understood by the general public. To determine if the content of a book is evidence-based, check if the authors cite research articles from peer-reviewed journals to support the book content.