Research-Practice Accelerator

Think through your research. In order to engage in research, there are many steps, such as:

• School / student recruitment
• IRB
• Gaining access to data
• If you’re doing things right, preregistration, data archiving, and providing access to data for replication

Once a project is done, impact is typically limited, since that takes further steps, which might include:

• Hosting some classroom technology
• Advertising it to teachers
• Allowing other researchers to do further research on top of it

If you build an algorithm to estimate student engagement, others should be able to use that algorithm when building their own systems. There should be an easy way to use it as an outcome in randomized control trials, to compare it to other engagement detectors, and to use it as a component in estimators of higher-level constructs. Research should be able to easily build up.

What would an initiative need to do in order to accelerate your work? To allow for others to build on top of it? For integrating work from diverse research? For allowing better work to reach millions of students? To accelerate the work of others?