Solving the Research Problem

¶ … administration had to conduct research to confirm the research agenda. The research agenda advises assessment of state policy as well as implementation and needed to be robust enough to created informed decisions. While there were a plethora and variety of articles provided, he articles provided in the research were not from recent articles. Some were over 6 years old and they should be a maximum of four years old.

Furthermore, the quality of the articles submitted were questionable. For example, some articles came from blogs or websites. They needed to be solely peer-reviewed. Many of the articles were also informative articles and not articles in which researchers conducted studies and performed reviews of other articles for their research topic/area of interest. Best practices come from results collected by researchers performing studies. They put forth a hypothesis and test this hypothesis in order to draw a conclusion.

Informative articles do not do this. They merely provide information about a subject. While informative articles are useful, they are just part of the equation. Research is an essential to policy development and enforcement of guidelines. It is also important for successful implementation of best practices because these strategies are designed from research collected. If the research is based on old data, there may be something missing due to not keeping updated.

When they submitted old articles some ranging from 1986 to 2009, this was not adequate information. They had to assess the topic, perform a literature review of peer-reviewed articles no later than 2012 and aim for collection of data from articles from 2015 and 2016. That the information offered is up-to-date with recent trends and practices in education. Education, just like healthcare is ever-evolving. It needs constant flow of new and recent information to continue.

For example, a 2014 article by Brown shows studies in comparative education do not include participants with disabilities. "Findings show that a limited number of studies in comparative education have examined students with disabilities, but numbers have increased in recent years. Additionally, two major themes emerged from the literature: (1) social interpretations of disability, and (2) global versus local" (Brown, 2014, p. 56). This is something to acknowledge and look out for when it comes to performing any future studies or incorporating new guidelines. Special education still remains an isolated aspect of school where children going to special education schools feels like they do not belong with other children.

Another good example of why researching recent articles is integral is because recent articles provide information of emerging trends like youth's reliance on internet websites for scholarly information versus textbooks and journals. A 2016 article shows Wikipedia can be a place that serves the research community and also can be seen as a research community. "Wikipedia can be seen as a research community: findings are constantly being published, scrutinized, verified, and the reputation of an author grows with the reputation of his or her contributions" (Staub & Hodel, 2016, p. 349). While it may be years from now when schools consider Wikipedia an actual academic source, it is a way for youth to quickly collect quality information and is something to consider when reviewing policy.

Step Two:

The community and agency setting is a state education agency. It is located in Virginia. It is called the Board of Education and Research for Virginia. The problem that arose was due in part to lack of proper research articles that dated back at maximum 4 years.

Older articles and studies do not provide the sufficient information necessary to address any policy concerns or changes and/or improving guidelines. The major steps taken arose from the implementation of a new research review where researchers had to look for newer articles and studies and review them to collect new guidelines and best practices that can then be applied to policy and guideline implementation. Articles collected were suggested to include from this year or from last year with the oldest set to four years ago. They all had to be peer-reviewed journal articles focusing on set topics.

A great resource that provides easy access to peer-reviewed education-themed journal articles is Eric.Ed.Gov. They provide a plethora of recent articles and a search engine that makes finding them easy. Sometimes people have trouble performing their task due to ease of access and convenience. Websites like these allow for data retrieval to be almost effortless and does not require a subscription fee or special access.