We are excited to have Katherine McEldoon and Alexandra Resch, two Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Impact Fellows, who joined the center in December 2023 to support the Accelerate, Transform, Scale (ATS) Initiative. The ATS Initiative supports advanced education research and development (R&D) to create scalable solutions to improve education outcomes for all learners and eliminate persistent achievement and attainment gaps.
Both of our FAS Fellows have experiences that reinforce the need to start with the science and to use the right methods at the right time to build solutions. They’ve observed that while researchers are great at producing insights about education and learning, and developers are great at building education solutions and technologies, the broader field isn’t yet great at is doing the two together. Through their careers, they’ve come to see rigorous research and development happening together as the path forward to build effective, evidence-based solutions.
In this blog, Alex and Katherine share about their career paths and how their unique experiences and perspectives are suited to help grow the ATS Initiative.
Alexandra Resch
I’ve always been driven by an urge to try to improve our education systems. I often felt bored in school and could see huge gaps in resources and opportunities among classrooms in my school and between my district and others nearby. I studied economics because the quantitative and analytic tools came naturally to me and because I could see the importance that incentives and resource constraints play in understanding how our systems work and how to improve them. I love the lens that economics provides to make sense of the world.
When I finished my PhD in 2008, I got my dream job as a researcher at Mathematica. Among other things, I worked on the What Works Clearinghouse, interesting methods papers, and national studies. I enjoyed these projects, but I started to worry that while I was doing great research, it wasn’t answering the questions practitioners had and wasn’t timely enough to inform their decisions. I gradually started shifting my work to be closer to decisions and decision makers, eventually building out a portfolio of work on rapid cycle evaluation and ways to be opportunistic about generating strong evidence. I also started thinking about how we talk about evidence and whether we’re framing questions and findings to privilege the status quo. I’ve come to believe the questions we ask, the methods we use, and how we describe our results all need to be different if we want to affect how the education system works and make a difference for student learning.
Over the last decade, I’ve developed expertise in R&D, learning about and applying tools and processes for human centered design, continuous improvement, product development, and product management. I haven’t put aside the tools I had from economics, but I have a bigger toolbox and am better able to use the right tool at the right time. I’ve seen progress in recent years in bringing more rigor to product development and more speed and agility to education research. I’m excited to support the work that the ATS initiative is doing to bring researchers and developers closer together into productive partnerships in the service of solving genuine problems for educators and students.
Katherine McEldoon
Early in my career, I set connecting scientific insights and education practice as my north star, and I haven’t looked back since. I was intrigued with what cognitive sciences could unlock: clear explanatory mechanisms of certain behaviors and beliefs—empirically validated, no less! There were so many insights ripe for the classroom, but why weren’t they being used?
Through my doctoral work at Vanderbilt University and the IES-funded Experimental Education Research Training (ExpERT) program, I grounded myself in cognitive theories of learning and designed instruction using those insights while measuring impact. This cross-training equipped me with the skillset I’d need to conduct a range of efficacy studies and honed my ability to speak multiple academic dialects—a skill that became more important as I grew in my career.
Next, I set my sights on scale-up: first at Arizona State University, where we incorporated a theory of active learning into teacher practice; then by running a state-level evaluation study for an EdTech start-up company; and finally by supporting a networked improvement community with the Tennessee Department of Education. I learned firsthand how many layers we had to work through to bring the "active ingredients” into the learner experience. I also developed an appreciation for the multifaceted collaborations it takes to bring these efforts together.
In 2019, I joined Pearson’s Efficacy and Learning division, where we collaborated with product development teams, providing research-based insights to inform learning design and outcome measurement. We started with insights from the learning sciences and conducted iterative R&D with end-users from ideation, to prototypes and designs, to mature product evaluations. The research perspective kept our eye on conducting development work in a careful, measured, and learning outcomes-focused way. The development perspective kept us centered on researching applied and immediate problems and keeping practical significance at the fore. When done well, the balance of research and development hummed into harmony, and resulted in effective, enjoyable experiences that really worked.
Through my career I’ve learned that instead of asking how do we connect research to practice, the better question is how do we intertwine the research and development process? Not only should we be starting with research-based insights, but we should also be integrating research methods and development processes to build a high quality and useful solution from the start. That’s precisely what we’re working to achieve with the ATS Initiative.
This blog was written by Alex Resch and Katherine McEldoon, Accelerate, Transform, Scale Initiative, NCER.