Hans Bos Explains How Best to Design Education Research

Policy makers are increasingly looking to big data to make decisions about curriculum, schools, students, and teachers.

In this video interview, Hans Bos, senior vice president at AIR, explains how to best use data and design education research to have a real impact on people and issues. In particular, good research should be relevant, valid, and reliable, Bos says.

“A lot of research that is done out there serves the researcher and maybe the general field more than it serves the policy makers who have to make decisions,” Bos says. “You need to do really the work that is required to make sure that whatever you do in your research project can generalize as broadly as possible to the world out there.”

Bos is an expert in the conduct of randomized control trials in education and other areas of social policy research including child development, welfare reform, and labor policy.