Challenges and Strategies for Study Recruitment in Education Research
Recruitment is an essential component of successful education research. To support an understanding of what works, for whom, and under what conditions, researchers need to recruit a sample that is large enough and can generalize to populations of interest. While recruiting districts and schools to participate in research has always been challenging, there is some evidence to suggest that it has become even more challenging since the COVID-19 pandemic.
This 90-minute webinar will offer practical strategies for researchers who are recruiting districts and schools to participate in education research. These strategies address common factors that may influence districts’ and schools’ ability and willingness to participate in research, including alignment with priorities and needs, staff capacity, beliefs about random assignment, and comfort with providing data. Dana Robinson, a researcher and experienced study recruiter at Mathematica, will open the webinar with an overview of Practical Strategies for Recruiting Districts and Schools for Education Impact Studies, a brief she recently co-authored to help researchers implement the Institute of Education Sciences’ (IES) Standards for Excellence in Education Research. She will then facilitate an interactive panel discussion composed of researchers who conduct recruitment and district staff who make decisions about study participation or support research staff. Panelists will discuss their experiences recruiting and participating in research and will answer questions posed by webinar attendees.
Panelists:
- Sarah Dickson, Director of External Research at Chicago Public Schools
- Rinat Fried, Research Associate at Oakland Unified School District
- Jason Snipes, Senior Research Scientist and the Director of Applied Research at the Regional Educational Laboratory West at WestEd
- Anja Kurki, Managing Researcher at the American Institutes for Research
