ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how a monitoring system can be used to establish an ongoing research program at the district level. A research program is a systematic inquiry into a set of related questions. Researchers and practitioners adopting a research program usually share assumptions about the underlying theory, methods, and styles of inquiry. They tend to agree about the starting points for inquiry, the key topics, the implicit definitions, the unit of analysis, and the methods of investigation (Shulman, 1986). Hammersley (1985) contends that successful research programs are based on a theory that promises to be true. A central concern is to specify the conditions under which the theory does or does not hold. A successful program is also productive: it generates findings relevant to policy or to the development of theory. This chapter sets out four basic questions that can be addressed with indicator data, describes some prototypical designs that can be used with the first three years of indicator data, and provides examples of the types of findings that a district research program can generate.
