ERIC Number: EJ927168
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 4
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0190-2946
EISSN: N/A
Media, Think Tanks, and Educational Research
Yettick, Holly
Academe, v97 n3 p17-20 May-Jun 2011
The Bunkum Awards are a sort of beauty contest for ugly people. Bestowed by the National Education Policy Center housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, they reward the most "nonsensical, confusing, and disingenuous" studies of education published each year. Contestants are drawn from reports critiqued by the Think Tank Review Project, a five-year-old initiative that provides peer reviews of think-tank reports about education. Though any think tank is eligible, the Bunkum Awards are annually dominated by one subsector: advocacy-oriented think tanks that often value ideology over methodology. They might be tongue-in-cheek, but these awards are also symbolic of a serious concern among many academics who study K-12 and higher education. Education professors worry that think-tank reports are more widely distributed than peer-reviewed research through the mainstream media and, as a result, have an outsized influence on policy and practice. Yet surprisingly little research exists on the nexus between the news media and schools and universities, despite the fact that education is among the nation's most significant public interests and expenses. So, in 2009, the National Education Policy Center commissioned the author to look into who was actually conducting the educational research mentioned in the news media. In this article, the author discusses the results of her study and provides some recommendations for professors who are interested in increasing mentions of peer-reviewed research in the news media.
Descriptors: Educational Research, Awards, News Media, Organizations (Groups), Research, Policy Formation, Peer Evaluation, Journalism, Probability, Educational Policy
American Association of University Professors. 1012 Fourteenth Street NW Suite 500, Washington, DC 20005. Tel: 800-424-2973; Tel: 202-737-5900; Fax: 202-737-5526; e-mail: academe@aaup.org; Web site: http://www.aaup.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: Teachers
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Colorado
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A