Research-- Let's use the term only when appropriate!

Recently I attended a meeting of a committee comprised of school board members, administrators, teachers, and a few community members. Our purpose is not important; I want to recount what happened and comment on how we need to be very careful about what we call research and how we handle professional information in today's digital world.

For our task, the committee needed a set of questions to evaluate some aspect of our school. Similar questions are used in schools all over then place and our task is a common one for education communities. When it came time to begin building our list of questions, a central office administrator stated "I did some research today, and this is what I found." At that point she distributed a collection of question lists she had printed from the Internet. The pages were complete with the poor appearance common when web pages are printed (the advertisements embedded in the pages were perhaps the best appearing sections of the hard copies she distributed) and the URL's and a date and time stamp (suggesting this "research" had been done minutes before the meeting started) were all on the photocopies handed out.

On first glance, this seems a reasonable action to take: We need questions and others have written similar questions, why not find what they have done? Well, I think this situation raises two important issues about professional educators and their relationship to information today.

First, looking something up on the Internet is not "doing research." Research is what we do when we have an unanswered question. Research includes gathering data, analyzing that data, and suggesting an answer to the question. All steps are conducted in a systematic and reasonable manner, and all decisions are recorded so they (and our conclusions) can be evaluated. We all check facts and get ideas be "Googling," but that is a much different information task than researching.

Second, why do we assume someone else's answers are better than our own and why do we spend hours (and hours and hours) looking for someone else's answers to our questions when we can generate our own answers (based on our education, our experience, and our knowledge of our local situation) in far less than time than is necessary to generate our own answers?

The task of our committee is important, but pretty ordinary. With the insight of our diverse committee, we could have generated our list of questions in far less time than it took for us to review the bland questions printed by the administrator who took the leadership role for generating our list of questions. I would hope any educator would be able to generate a list of questions that once answered would be provide information essential to evaluating important aspects of school life.

By relying on the Internet for answers to questions that we are in the best position to answer, we are both accepting the same superficial answers that have too broad an appeal and we are devaluing our own experience and skill.