Suchergebnisse

Within each cabinet-level department of the federal government there are offices responsible for research, evaluation, and statistics. These offices are critical to producing evidence for social policy and encouraging its use. An evidence agenda within a department will flounder, or never even emerge, if its research office is weak. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), established in 2002, is markedly different from the iterations of a federal education research offices that preceded it, and it has been successful in developing an evidence agenda in the Department of Education. Here, I use the IES example to address the challenge of improving the functioning of research offices in the federal government. I identify key ingredients in the success of IES that may be relevant to the reform of other federal research offices.

Facilitated communication, a technique that is said to enhance the communicative abilities of individuals with severe language impairments, has engendered much controversy. Biklen and Duchan (1994) and Green and Shane (1994) present two sides of this controversy. Biklen and Duchan argue that from a constructivist's perspective, the primary issue is the underlying cultural presuppositions regarding mental retardation and science rather than the efficacy of facilitated communication. Green and Shane present research evidence challenging the efficacy of facilitated communication within a positivist's framework. We present a brief review of science as viewed through positivists' and constructivists' lenses. Using the framework of social constructivism adopted by Biklen and Duchan, we disagree with them on three points: (a) even though the process of constructing scientific knowledge is strongly affected by human social, emotional, and cognitive processes, it also involves matters of fact that cannot be ignored; (b) social constructivists' accounts of science can be accepted as descriptive without being prescriptive; (c) although we cannot prove that belief systems, including positivism and social constructivism, are true or false in the larger sense, belief systems have differential consequences for technological changes of the type that are valued by persons with severe impairments of communication.

The federal government released earnings data on U.S. colleges and universities for the first-time last month. The new College Scorecard adds an important new dimension to previous government data collections on colleges and universities, which focused on inputs such as number of faculty and student characteristics and the immediate outcomes of retention and graduation rather than longer term outcomes including earnings in the labor market. The authors examine the extent to which the Scorecard provides reliable and valid data, discuss whether it should be used by students and the general public to identify schools that provide the biggest bang for the buck, and identify actions that this or a future administration could take to improve the functions that Scorecard is intended to serve. ; Economic Studies at Brookings