Evaluators report effects of education initiatives as standardized effect sizes, a scale that has merits but obscures interpretation of the effects' practical importance. Consequently, educators and policymakers seek more readily interpretable translations of evaluation results. One popular metric is the number of years of learning necessary to…

In the current article, we consider the influential position of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and discuss several methodological areas that demonstrate the need for caution when using and interpreting PISA results. We motivate our argument by briefly describing the program's increased influence in educational policy…

One of the purposes of introducing the use of action research in schools is to bring about educational change in policy and practice. To make this happen, it is of paramount importance to look into how teachers actually see action research. We, the writers of this paper, are teacher educators, teaching preschool teachers courses related to action…

The title is catchy and positive: "Smart, Skilled, and Striving: Transforming and Elevating the Teaching Profession." It sounds like a teacher-friendly approach to improving the perceptions and experiences of teachers working in classrooms. However, this report published by the Center for American Progress uses popular rhetoric and sound…

The trend towards using research knowledge to improve policies and practices is on the rise. However, despite considerable effort and notable progress in recent years, it seems that school practitioners continue to make little use of research and it is not clear what conditions would facilitate or obstruct this use. This review focuses exclusively…

"The Integration Anomaly" explores a "puzzling divergence" between changes in metropolitan residential and school segregation. Based on a review of existing literature, it argues that the best way to address rising school segregation is to decouple school assignment from neighborhoods through universal school choice. The report…

This report assesses the impact of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research's (NCVER) research against two themes: the role of apprenticeships in a modern economy (focusing on work relating to completions) and the nature of the vocations and competencies required by industry. The evaluation spans work published from 2005 to 2015 and…

In this paper we compare the use of research and other evidence in the decision-making practices of two groups of education policy elites, situated in different contexts--provincial education ministries and school districts. Data are derived from two pan-Canadian studies: Galway (2006) and Sheppard, Galway, Brown and Wiens (2013). The findings…

In the current educational landscape, pressures are ever increasing on educational policy and practice to use research to guide improvement. In recent years, federal programs such as No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and Race to the Top have all provided strong incentives for the use of research in decision-making. Research-practice…

This Center for American Progress report examines whether states' adoption of standards-based policies predicts low-income students' NAEP achievement trends in fourth and eighth grade math and reading throughout the 2003-2013 decade. The report claims to analyze changes across five separate two-year intervals, but it only reports findings for…

This paper is about the relationship between research, policy and practice in education. It outlines reasons for the increased interest in research and its impact and describe some of the difficulties in studying this relationship. A conceptualization of the knowledge mobilization process is presented that identifies three overlapping and…

This article develops a framework for investigating research use, using an "advocacy coalition framework" and the concepts of a "supply side" (mainly organizations) and "demand side" (policymakers). Drawing on interview data and documents from New Orleans about the charter school reforms that have developed there…

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other…

Current changes affecting education systems have impacted teaching work as a whole. The concept of teachers' and establishments' effectiveness was introduced to operationalise an approach that is dominated by the cost-benefit model. This article uses this premise to suggest an analysis of the social value of teaching work, and more specifically…

Educational policy debates are no longer occurring exclusively in academic or governmental settings. Intermediary actors are promoting research using a variety of traditional and non-traditional media to advance and oppose policy agendas. Given the current policy arena, it is useful to re-examine the research underlying current reforms, and to…