This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

The Mississippi Public Universities Research Catalog is mandated by the State through the University Research Center Act of 1988 (§ 37-141-17). The publication lists the funding amounts by the sources of funding and by the university disciplines receiving the funding. It is designed for use by state policy makers, the educational community,…

Decades of research show that exclusionary discipline practices (e.g., office discipline referrals, suspensions) are disproportionately applied for specific racial groups. Losen and Skiba (2010) found that African American students are three times more likely to be suspended as their White peers. Although the problem of disciplinary inequity is…

With the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014, Northampton Community College began the creation of Integrated Education and Training (IE&T) programs in October 2015. After a needs assessment was conducted with the partners, programs were created to address the needs in the hospitality and healthcare sectors.…

McBeath and Austin define the concept of research-minded practitioners, describe the organizational contexts, structures, and strategies for supporting this type of practitioner. Further, the authors propose a research agenda to establish effective organizational development strategies to support research-minded practitioners, align their efforts…

Most education reporters from time to time will tread into the world of education research, whether to gauge charter school achievement, the impact of teacher quality, or the effects of a reading program, among myriad possibilities. But making sense of the research, with its often-impenetrable prose, dizzying figures, and mathematical formulas,…

This article offers a rationale for the contributions of qualitative research to evidence-based practice in special education. In it, I make the argument that qualitative research encompasses the ability to study significant problems of practice, engage with practitioners in the conduct of research studies, learn and change processes during a…

The eight presidential addresses included in this essay, delivered between 1923 and 2009, focus wholly or partly on education politics and policy. Although they reflect their different intellectual and social times, they share a dominant theme in documenting the shifting and uneasy relationship between research and education policy. Presidents…

Data-informed instructional methods offer tremendous promise for increasing the effectiveness of teaching, learning, and schooling. Yet-to-be-developed data science approaches have the potential to dramatically advance instruction for every student and to enhance learning for people of all ages. Next steps that emerged from a recent National…

Calls for evidence-based policy often fail to recognise the fundamentally political nature of policy making. Policy makers must identify, evaluate and utilise evidence to solve policy problems in the face of competing priorities and political agendas. Evidence should inform but cannot determine policy choices. This paper draws on theories of…

As the integration of academic teaching and research with communities of practice is considered a major concern of public administration since its founding as a field, professional programmes were established on the premise that there is a positive relationship between practice and scholarship. However, the balance between them is considered…

What topic would you choose if you had the luxury of writing forever? In this article, John Thelin provides his response: He would opt to write about the history of higher education in a way that relies on quantitative data. "Numbers, please!" is his research request in taking on a longitudinal study of colleges and universities over…

Education researchers have sought to address the divide between research and persistent problems of practice faced by educators through technology, pedagogy, and methodology innovations (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Mishra & Koehler, 2007; Richey, 1998). Barriers to the successful development and implementation of technological innovations…

Without deliberate and resourced translation, research evidence is unlikely to inform policy and practice. This paper describes the processes and practical solutions used to translate evaluation research findings to improve the readability of print materials in a large scale worksite health programme. It is argued that a knowledge brokering and…

Epstein makes a strong argument for the value of clinical data mining (CDM), although he minimizes some of the potential limitations in that methodology, such as attrition. Epstein's portrayal of evidence-based practice (EBP) as practitioner-bashing and treasuring intervention manuals overlooks the emphasis in the EBP process on the need for…