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Research Agenda
Education in the 21st Century must prepare students for the information era. Rote learning and static funds of
knowledge can no longer represent the goal of education. Students will need to be able to connect their
understanding to historical themes and patterns and project their actions and conclusions into the future.
Schools must stimulate and prepare students to be lifelong learners who are able to effectively access and
synthesize new information, master disciplinary domains and, arguably most importantly, integrate knowledge
across disciplinary boundaries.
Founded in 1996, the Ross Institute for Advanced Study and Innovation in Education was established to promote
understanding of the implications of globalization for pre-collegiate education. It serves to bring together
leading scholars, educators and policy makers in order to incubate new ideas and act as a catalyst for educational
change. The Ross Institute is closely affiliated with Ross Lab School and is a not-for-profit research organization
dedicated to exploring and applying innovation to pre-collegiate education and building links between
pre-collegiate and tertiary educators in the following areas:
- Globalization and Education
- Interdisciplinary Curriculum for Cultural Understanding
- Scaling Up of Innovation School Models
- Mind, Brain, and Education
- Media, Communication and Technology Education
- Well-being and Nutrition
The Ross Institute for Advanced Study of Innovation in Education acts as a catalyst for research. It actively
networks institutions and researchers from all over the world who are developing educational innovations in the
research areas promoted by the Institute. The Institute serves to fundraise to support the Ross Laboratory School,
as well as to generate seed monies for initiating research projects. A key function of the Ross Institute is to
facilitate dissemination of best practices and emerging findings. It does so by supporting distributed professional
development, conferences, publications and multi-media distribution via websites, as well as audio and video
recordings. It also supports the development of the innovative Curriculum Builder database software.
In the endeavor to distribute research-based best practices and professional development as well as to scale-up
innovative school models partnerships must be forged between pre-collegiate and tertiary educational institutions.
Currently, the Ross Lab School and Ross Institute are establishing an Inter-University Consortium dedicated to
working collaboratively to transform education.
The Ross Institute of Advanced Study of Innovation in Education is dedicated to the dissemination of all the
research that it undertakes, with a strong emphasis on the usability of this research.
- Academic dissemination will include international academic conferences, journals (such as the forthcoming
Journal of MindBrain Education), a book series (such as the proposed series Beyond Tolerance: Culture and
Education in the Global Era with University of California Press), panels and presentations at scholarly
conferences and articles and chapters in academic volumes.
- Students who will become future researchers, teachers and educational leaders will receive training in these
domains at the universities participating in the Consortium through public lectures, courses, research
assistantships, pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships. They will build on what they are learning by spending
time at the Ross Lab School field site and at other similar affiliated lab schools in global cities around the
world.
- To expand the reach of emerging findings, a variety of strategies for distributing information to educational
practitioners will include: continuing education conferences and tele-conferences, training and coaching protocols,
curriculum planning tools, strategic planning tools, web-based instruments, networking tools, adaptable management
information systems and resource management systems.
- Policy makers will be reached through specially designed policy papers and presentations aimed to convey the
policy implications of scholarly findings and best options available for policy makers working in these domains.
- Websites are under construction which will a serve as publicly-accessible international knowledge portals to
facilitate networks for scholars, policymakers, practitioners, parents and students to learn about and discuss basic
scholarly findings in each area of research, provide online "toolkits" and connect the research with educational
practice and policy.
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