Research Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Promoting Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Education
Item
Title
Research Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Promoting Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Education
Abstract/Description
Background: In the United States, an emphasis on evidence-based decision-making in education has received renewed interest with the recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. However, how best, in practice, to support the use of evidence in educational decision-making remains unclear. Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs) are a popular strategy for cultivating evidence-based decision-making among educators, but understanding the ways in which partnerships can influence educators’ use of research evidence in their decision-making is limited.Purpose: This paper explores the influence that Research Practice Partnerships can have on educators’ evidence-based decision-making.Sources of evidence: A framework is offered for examining the impact of Research Practice Partnerships on behaviours such as educators’ evidence-based decision-making, in the context of school and district improvement efforts. The framework suggests a host of intermediary and long-term outputs: for example, the ‘mindsets’ of researchers and practitioners which are most conducive to enabling evidence-based decision-making among those engaged in Research Practice Partnerships. We explore this framework through short illustrations of the experiences of three Research Practice Partnerships, contextualising the ideas within the literature, and presenting the process of our design and pilot of a survey instrument used to examine the perceived impact of Research Practice Partnerships.Main argument: We argue that participants’ self-reported behaviours and perceptions are important elements in examining the influence of Research Practice Partnerships on educators’ evidence-based decision-making. Additionally, this paper examines the potential benefits and challenges of attempting to measure the outputs and outcomes of a Research Practice Partnership using a survey measure.Conclusions: The process of developing the pilot survey suggests that certain conditions in Research Practice Partnerships may be more conducive to the development among educators of behaviours, mindsets and perceptions associated with evidence-based decision-making.
Author/creator
Date
In publication
Volume
59
Issue
2
Pages
241-255
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Empirical
Keywords
Open access/full-text available
No
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISSN
0013-1881
Citation
Wentworth, L., Mazzeo, C., & Connolly, F. (2017). Research Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Promoting Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Education. Educational Research, 59(2), 241–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/07391102.2017.1314108
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