relquestions

I’ve previously published a very popular post about the federally-funded Regional Educational Laboratories “Ask a REL” program (see Send An Ed-Related Research Question To One Of The Regional Educational Laboratories – And They’ll Answer It!).

As the headline of that previous post says, all you have to do is submit an education-related question here and they’ll answer it.

I was doing research last summer on the difference between “collaborative and cooperative learning” and REL_West_Reference_Desk_memo_coop_vs_collab_learning.7.15rev”>was pleased with the memo REL West developed in response to it.

But the point of this post is not to just rehash old information, no matter how useful it is.

The great thing I recently learned was that at least some of the regional RELs maintain easily searchable archives of their responses to past questions that have been submitted. Many of them are very useful to educators because lots have been submitted by teachers looking for very practical and understandable advice — which is often lacking or hard-to-find in arcane academic papers.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the RELS have not combined all their responses in one big searchable database, but at least a few have created very accessible archives of responses to hundreds of questions. It also seems odd to me that some don’t seem to keep any kind of public archive – at least any that were easy to find on their websites. You’d think that they’d want to make the fruits of their work easily available.

Here are the ones I’ve found – let me know if I’m missing any:

REL-West Archives (the ones that did a great job responding to my question)

REL Southeast Archive

REL Mid-Atlantic Archive

REL Southwest doesn’t appear to have a searchable archive, but they do have a small collection of their most recent responses.

REL Midwest has their responses categorized at the bottom of this page, but it doesn’t appear to be searchable.

REL Pacific has a small collection of their responses here.

I think you’ll want to check our their resources. And, please let me know if I’ve missed archives of responses at some of the RELs….