The Trump administration’s ongoing reforms of the federal education research and development enterprise have challenged the Alliance for Learning Innovation and all education stakeholders working to leverage research and best practices to improve learning opportunities for American students. While I am optimistic that the Trump administration and Congress will capitalize on the opportunity to rebuild an education R&D enterprise that is more responsive to the needs of students, I am also confident existing research can be better used to improve education today.
In a recent article, “Can AI Bridge Education’s Research-to-Practice Gap?” Learn Capital’s Matthew Barry presented a vision for an AI tool to make education research findings more accessible. Barry describes the tool as “ChatGPT meets JSTOR”:
For those of us who have followed education research and are familiar with the federal government’s tools, such as the What Works Clearinghouse, it’s exciting to imagine how artificial intelligence could make decades of federally funded research more accessible to teachers and others involved in providing education.
It’s discouraging that education research is often overlooked. The prominent Sold a Story podcast detailed how public school districts and teachers nationwide routinely used ineffective methods of reading instruction and ignored comprehensive research evidence compiled by the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report. As far back as the 1970s, a comprehensive national evaluation called Project Follow Through identified Direct Instruction as a top teaching method—findings that have been forgotten for nearly 50 years.
Some of the blame falls on the federal education R&D enterprise. The current approach to publishing R&D evidence has not been effective in reaching educators. For example, a survey of over 700 school and district leaders revealed that only 17 percent of them used the What Works Clearinghouse regularly. However, it may also be the nature of educational research and the reality of life as a teacher. Busy teachers aren’t going to consult abstracts of the latest education research like the What Works Clearinghouse assumes.
The Institute of Education Sciences should make research findings more accessible to parents and teachers. In fact, one of the IES contracts canceled earlier this year was attempting to make the What Works Clearinghouse more accessible to practitioners. However, Barry is correct that there is no reason to wait for the federal government to act to make the findings of education R&D more useful.
Generative artificial intelligence is already changing American education. “From AI tutors to writing assistants, schools are rushing to integrate AI into classrooms,” Barry wrote. “Yet research on GenAI’s educational impact is in its infancy, with many teachers remaining skeptical. There’s a narrow window to shape how AI is applied to learning, ensuring it becomes an evidence-based boon rather than a hype-driven distraction.”
Today, a tool like the proposed “Learning Science Evidence Hub” could be used by teachers who increasingly use AI in the classroom to develop lesson plans. It could also help millions of Americans who now have the power to choose the right learning environment for their children, thanks to the nationwide movement to provide parents with education savings accounts. A Learning Science Evidence Hub could also help evaluate the anticipated return on investment from philanthropic and private-sector investments and education interventions to better promote human capital development.
Some models already use AI tools in this way. For example, The Learning Agency created a custom chatbot to provide evidence-based education advice.
Looking forward, the Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences should leverage AI tools to make educational research findings more accessible to the public. Such tools could be even more useful and trusted if the private sector and the education research community collaborated to create them.
While 2025 has proven to be a challenging year for the education R&D community, exciting breakthroughs are on the horizon.
