Episode 108: Data, Teaching, and Learning with Darleen Opfer, Vice President at RAND Corporation

Darleen Opfer is Vice President and Director of the RAND Education and Labor Research Division at RAND. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. As a nonpartisan organization, RAND is widely respected for operating independently of political and commercial pressures.

Darleen has conducted policy research studies for several local, state, and national governments on issues that affect teachers and schools, including recruitment and retention, professional development, and the impact of policies on teacher practice.

What Role Does RAND Play in Bringing Data to the Forefront of the conservation?

The ongoing problem is that people do not understand how science progresses. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic was happening, it wasn’t that the DFA or CDC was wrong but they were making judgments based on the evidence available to them at the time. From doing more research and testing they were able to find more solutions to help the country but what they also should have said is based on their evidence, and let everyone know they have a very narrow set of evidence available at the time. Over the year more data comes in and patterns start to form so then the FDA or CDC will need to revise because now they know more about what happened with the vaccines than they did before. Every researcher needs to be humble because, at any one period of time, they are only operating on the data they have available. With RAND, they collect data in a neutral fashion. They are not trying to prove that the hypothesis is right or wrong. They want to state the hypothesis in advance, and to be able to state what they have researched and what research methods they are going to use in advance because one of the things that happen, and this is seen more in lobbyists and some thinktanks and take a look in a political position is that they are looking. They are essential “fishing” for data that supports their position. What happens is that they change their analysis to come up with the right outcome. If you state ahead of time that you are doing this study and show your hypothesis and show the data you are collecting and even describe how you are analyzing the data then people can fish. You just have to take what that analysis gives you. You should never start to mess with the methods to influence the outcome. RAND is the independent source that looks over the shoulder of the people who are collecting the data for a particular purpose and have a stake in the outcome. It becomes really important

How Does RAND Identify What Students Need Which Help Based on the Data Collected?

Despite the fact that teaching how people teach and the quality of their teaching is hugely important. It is important for students and families but in general, there is very little known about it. The knowledge they have about what makes good teaching is so small compared to how important it is. One solution does not solve all the problems so part of the problem is improving the teaching quality in the United States. The interchange between a teacher and a student is so dynamic it takes a lot of training and experience for a teacher to be able to read a student, read where they are, and figure out what that means in terms of their interaction with that student which is a difficult task that not many teachers can do. There is the traditional way of teaching where a teacher would stand in front of the classroom and teach many students but it is very antiquated and doesn’t address the way that students learn or need to learn. With the shift from in-person to hybrid and online the students and teachers had to learn and adapt to a new way of teaching and learning. In terms of changing the data collection, it was a huge effort. Prior to the pandemic, there was already a situation where the majority of teachers, either K through 12 or secondary or even post-secondary were really focused on facts and routines, and practice. They saw less cognitively demanding things which really makes the students thinks and describe and understand why it is done and how can it be done. They get to explore the different kinds of teachings. With the pandemic and everyone making the shift to online, the teachers are still stuck with what they typically did which is lecture and ask factual questions which were boring and hard for students to pay attention to in the new virtual environment. The pandemic brought to bear on what was wrong with the system before the pandemic, and what was wrong with our teaching before. It highlighted these problems and thus was able to get new data on how much learning loss they saw so by having analyzed and identify the problems they can come up with a solution.

How Does RAND Get Data From the Students to Overall Solve the Problem of How Teachers Can Teach Better?

Most of the studies conducted by RAND are in classrooms, schools, universities, and colleges where they have researchers on the ground and they are observing teaching. They’re interviewing and surveying students and teachers and faculty members. They are also doing focus groups. When the pandemic happened, universities and schools shut down all of a sudden, and they did not have access to the data. The only data they were getting was secondary data. which is data that a school reports or a teacher reports which was not ideal because there are all kinds of issues with that data. RAND’s absolute preference is primary data, the data that they have collected. Because of the pandemic, they had to rethink how to collect data. When it came to asking questions and interviewing, that was easier as it was just a simple video call. The question still remained how can we still collect primary data in this situation? Some stuff could not be collected because of the limited access to the students. If you think about parents and students, the video was already intrusive into their lives in their classroom so they certainly do not want a researcher looking into their homes and seeing their backgrounds. They learn new ways to collect data so their primary data can still be valid.

Contact Darleen Opfer

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-darleen-opfer-b46b7b15/

Learn more about RAND Corporation

Website: https://www.rand.org/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rand-corporation/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rhino.reviews/

Darleen Opfer RAND Bio: https://www.rand.org/about/people/o/opfer_v_darleen.html

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