Blog: Vaccine Development and Education R&D

How the COVID-19 crisis helps us understand the dire need to modernize education R&D

During the last two years, we have realized the detrimental effects of how students and their families have suffered due to COVID-19 crisis. 1 in 3 parents voice concerns over their child’s mental health, and schools have seen a 3 month loss in learning in math and about a 1.5 month loss in learning of reading due to the consequences of lack of peer interaction, a growing digital divide, and unstable social and emotional environments. The pandemic will continue to impact children and demand extraordinary paths for short and long-term recovery. Without clear best practices and research to guide educators since the start of the pandemic, each educational entity is left to navigate the damaged pavement on their own. 

Education research is cumbersome and difficult to navigate, and there is little to no interaction between researchers and practitioners in realizing results in the classroom. The chasm between practitioners’ demand and researchers’ supply of evidence-based practices that allow for improved decision making at the school level has always been wide and it is only worsening. In these unprecedented times, we need to make research inclusive and widely accessible to all stakeholders and embrace unconventional research methods that lead to better student outcomes. There is a need to create a common language and a standardized framework to drive large amounts of research and arrive at consistent solutions, and we draw inspiration from the healthcare sector. 

No one could have predicted the pandemic, but the path to recovery through the development of the COVID-19 vaccine is inarguably one of the greatest coordinated innovations in the modern era. The well-paved road from problem identification to creation to immunization was made possible by decades of effort in creating a large scale research and development infrastructure, collection of data through interoperable systems, creation of a shared language among researchers, and widespread beliefs in its cruciality. Researchers have been studying vaccines - and mRNA research - for decades. Past outbreaks and diseases catalyzed imperative research leading to a myriad of potential outcomes. For example, the decades of work currently being done to create a protective HIV vaccine has consistently led to new discoveries that can assist in aiding future outbreaks, as was the case with developing the COVID vaccine. By the time the pandemic started, all researchers had to do was understand the genetic makeup of SARS-CoV-2 in order to continue with research design and clinical trials. 

Similar to healthcare, what if there was ample data and research available to sufficiently design and implement interventions that would have catered to all students’ individual needs? What if there were readymade solutions that would ease the load off of educators and foster students’ academic and social-emotional success? The questions above might seem obvious, but the truth is, education has not figured it out unlike other sectors. 

A strong R&D infrastructure in education has the potential to provide us with answers to the most pressing questions related to digital access, student engagement, and student health, with tangible solutions able to be carried out with full integrity. 

We do not need to wait until the next pandemic to answer what works for whom, when, and how -- we can start now.