On September 22, 2022, the National Academy of Sciences held a symposium entitled Endless Frontier 2022: Research and Higher Education Institutions for the Next 75 Years. The event was a follow up to a February 2020 NAS symposium convened to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the landmark report Science, the Endless Frontier. Building on the 2020…

This keynote address discusses previous and ongoing efforts to reduce the persistent gap between research and practice in social work and offers recommendations for further bridging that gap. Key among those recommendations is the need to conduct descriptive outcome studies of efforts to adapt research-supported interventions in everyday practice…

Using a case study, the complex challenge of making mathematics education research accessible to secondary mathematics teachers was addressed with two questions. How can we design a method that will meet the challenge of making research usable for mathematics teachers? And what would this method be? To address this challenge we describe a process…

This paper shares a vision of the future of institutional research (IR) for the 21st century, in which institutional researchers learn to see themselves as the critical knowledge workers in the higher education industry. To take on this role, IR needs to: (1) understand the concepts of knowledge management (KM); (2) use new tools to meet the…

This paper attempts to define evaluation use and manipulable variables related to it. Approaches to defining evaluation use have included typologies inventorying kinds of evaluation use, threshold criteria defining accepted levels of evidence, construct or operational definitions, and dependence on the perspective of the decision maker. None of…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how quantitative research articles can be made much more reader-friendly. It illustrates how statistical language and research terminology can be simplified in reports. The paper also demonstrates how quantitative reports could be restructured to make them more reader friendly without sacrificing any…

During the past 20 years great efforts have been made to systematize and institutionalize educational research and development. At the same time, changing government priorities, shifting roles of participating institutions, and the politicization of social research have contributed to discontinuity and turmoil. The time has come to consider…

Recent work integrating Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) with Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) forms a basis for systematizing action research in higher education. This basis strengthens what are often otherwise its methodological weaknesses, namely, the disconnection between analysis and subsequent plans for action and the…

The author believes her ideas on evaluation reporting are old ideas in various fields including communication theory, advertising, social science, and learning theory. The human factor in reporting evaluation must be considered. Those being evaluated often feel threatened by the evaluation. Evaluators need to accept the behaviors of evaluation…

The paper offers suggestions to improve today's climate for technological aids for the blind, describes some currently available aids and some future possibilities from research, and addresses the question of programed implementation. (Author/SBH)

There are at least three ways in which educational theory can be used in practice: (1) to reexamine our traditional approaches, (2) to provide direction in future practice, and (3) to generate research. Reexamination of traditional approaches through analysis and utilization of theoretical methods is one means of promoting constant growth and…

Communication policy research has been defined as a response to the policy maker's increasing need for factual information in an environment of accelerating technological change. This definition presumed that the social researcher provided the policy maker with such information. Enough examples of contradition between research findings and policy…

This paper summarizes recent experience of large-scale, nationally representative longitudinal youth transition studies in the United States. Two study series are considered. First is the longitudinal youth cohorts of the U.S. Department of Labors Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Longitudinal Youth Study, with cohorts that started in 1979…

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a quantitative literature review or research synthesis can be used to aggregate information in the item response theory literature to address specific research questions. The research questions focused on the magnitude of the contribution of the number of items and number of examinees to the accuracy…

This paper makes a case that when teachers and school leaders (administrators) engage in site-based action research they become more efficacious leaders. This paper reviews eight years of research work of site-based research projects completed by school-based personnel as well as the experiences of teachers and school administrators who have…