National Board research request

National Board research request Dear National Board,

I am a NBCT, and currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University. I am working with Professor Dan McFarland on the final round of a major grant proposal to the Spencer Foundation exploring the translation of educational research into practice. I am writing to inquire about the possibility of collaborating with you on acquiring data for this project. We are interested in whether you would be able to share a corpus of national board submissions. This research would be conducted under Stanford’s IRB, and our lab has a dedicated data team which would be able to ensure compliance with any data requirements. For our purposes, we would not need any metadata related to the submissions except the year, so they could be pre-anonymized, or we could anonymize them before working with them.

Our goal is to compare the relative emphasis of different topics from educational research and how use of topics changes, over time in both the academic research community and among practitioners. We believe National Board submissions represent the gold standard of how working teachers understand and apply educational research. We plan to use machine learning techniques able to process (and requiring) large amounts of text, so it would be ideal if it were possible to work out a collaboration allowing you to share a large corpus of submissions. Ultimately, the goal is to learn which research ends up being useful and salient to practitioners, and how it is understood and applied differently in different communities.

We are currently finalizing our proposal, and so would appreciate an initial response on whether you have and would be able to share a corpus of school self-study reports, even if final approval were contingent on certain conditions or further discussion. If I can clarify any aspects of this request, please don’t hesitate to email or call. Thanks!

Chris Proctor PhD candidate Stanford Graduate School of Education cproctor@stanford.edu 323.230.0313