Using a Complex Systems Approach to Study Educational Policy

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2010) —

Educational policy is controversial: positions on achievement gaps, troubled schools and class size are emotionally charged, and research studies often come to very different conclusions.

Researchers at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and School of Education and Social Policy argue in an article published Oct. 1 in the journal Science that such an approach can help integrate insights and better inform educational policy. By breaking down policies into simple rules and computationally modeling them under different conditions, professors Uri Wilensky and Luis Amaral have found a promising new way to understand policy issues such as school choice and student tracking.

But to get a complete view of education, researchers must use methods that integrate insights about micro-level processes (the student) with macro-level outcomes (student achievement). To do this, Wilensky and Amaral look at education as a complex system: a system with many interacting parts that only can be understood by examining the interactions of the parts and the networks that connect them. Knowledge of the parts alone doesn't lead to understanding of the whole system. [read more]

Sounds promising. Too bad the article did not have a diagram of the system in study with the article. Oh, well.

What the research group found out was low achievers tend to do better in a group with high achievers.