Involving Practitioners in Evaluation Studies: How Viable is Collaborative Evaluation in Schools?

The notion of involving practitioners in a school-based research* process is not new. At the turn of the century, John Dewey gave teachers and students direct roles in ongoing inquiry, and the progressive tradition, with newfound support from the teacher researcher movement (Stenhouse, 1975), has continued to encourage that practice in schools. Action research, named by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the late 1940s, brought together university-based researchers with community individuals to engage in collaborative problem solving about some of the most difficult issues of the day. The related rise of educational action research in the 1950s (Corey, 1953; Taba and Noel, 1957) pointed to the potential of research collaboration to effect meaningful change in schools. However, a number of factors-for example, the lack of time for such work in the traditional school day; methodological challenges from the research community; and the development of a federally-funded Research, Development, and Diffusion (RD&D) model following the launch of Sputnik-led, until recently, to the decline of collaborative research in the United States (King and Lonnquist, 1992).1 The currently burgeoning literature on teacher research (e.g., Kincheloe, 1991; CochranSmith and Lytle, 1993) and educational action research (e.g., Holly and Whitehead, 1984) points to the re-emergence of this process as a means of professional development, school improvement, and, some would claim (e.g., McTaggart, 1991), long-term social change.