Providing Feedback to the Schools Posted on February 15, 2006 Robert C. Pianta (bio) discusses how to provide feedback to sites without giving overt recommendations.

A key piece of the partnerships with schools or any other community-based site that you might be working with, it's incumbent on you at some level to provide feedback back to them about the information you're finding. I think there are some issues in terms of, clearly issues in terms of confidentiality, in terms sometimes of the sensitivity of the findings. You also have to be careful about, once you feed back to an organization, something about itself or its effects, you in a sense become part of a change process, and you don't always have control over how those results might be used.

We err on the side of being more general; we always aggregate our data to the highest level of aggregation before we feed it back, and we make it part of, in a sense, the contract in the beginning that we will provide feedback but we will not be providing feedback at a level that we feel would have direct implications for any changes that the organization might make. We try to clearly divorce ourselves from the organization's own change process, the school's own change process.

The degree to which results do have implications for how a school might do its work would be something our results might, we might be involved in discussions with school systems about their plans for change based on our results, but I always set those up as separate conversations from the conversations where I'm just going to feed back the information about this is what we did and this is what we've been learning.

I think it's really important to distinguish those, and it's not always easy to distinguish those two uses particularly from the perspective of the listener, of the club or of the school system because they're often not clear in their own frame of reference as to how they plan to use the information. They know they like to get information back, and many times a school will say, 'Well, we just want to hear what you've been doing,' and then immediately the conversation will shift into 'Well, what do you think we ought to do?' I think that's when a researcher, particularly most junior investigators are doing pretty small-scale studies which have very little in the way of implications for the kinds of policies or practices that a school might be engaged in and thinking about changing.

A researcher needs to be very careful about backing away from making any recommendations when they are providing feedback back to schools or clubs.

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