Education Research: Further Improvements Needed to Ensure Relevance and Assess Dissemination Efforts

United States. Government Accountability Office.

United States. Government Accountability Office.

关键词: Government accountability -- United States.;    education;    education research;    letter report;   

RP-ID  :  GAO-14-8
RP-ID  :  659419

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Education's (Education) Institute of Education Sciences (IES) supports high-quality research, but lacks certain key procedures needed to fulfill other aspects of its mission. According to stakeholders, IES has substantially improved the quality of education research since its inception over a decade ago. However, GAO identified concerns with IES's ability to produce timely and relevant research. For example, IES's efforts are slow to respond to stakeholders' needs, in part, because the time IES's products have spent in peer review has substantially increased in recent years--from an average of 117 days in fiscal year 2011 to 150 days in fiscal year 2013--and IES does not monitor some aspects of these timeframes. In addition, IES does not have a structured process for incorporating stakeholder input into its research agenda, which previous GAO work has shown to be key to sound federal research programs. Lastly, IES's performance measures do not fully reflect its current programs, which is not consistent with leading practices GAO has identified for performance management. For example, IES does not publicly report on the overall performance of the Regional Educational Laboratories (REL) program, which constitutes one of the agency's largest investments. IES officials said that they have begun to develop new performance measures for all of their programs, but these will not be in place until fiscal year 2015."