This study describes the activities and influence of three different types of research practice partnerships (RPPs) that shared a common focus on improving mathematics teaching and learning. The three types of RPPs were a networked improvement community (NIC), a design research partnership (DRP), and a research alliance (RA). These types differ in…

This study examined how school and district leaders access, value, and use research. From a representative sample of school districts across the United States, we surveyed 733 school and district leaders as part of an effort to develop understanding of the prevalence of research use, the nature of leaders' attitudes toward research, and individual…

According to the literature, practitioners' use of research appears to play an important role in facilitating high-quality applied practice. Previous studies indicate that teachers have a positive attitude towards using research, but that they are rarely successful in implementing it in their actual practice. There appears to be a scarcity of…

The demand for students to continue studying STEM subjects at post-16 and higher education levels remains high. Since the curriculum reforms in Science and Mathematics across phases in England were initiated in 2014, uncertainty remains on the impact that these reforms will have on students and teachers as the reforms continue to be implemented…

This paper aims to extend understanding of the business and societal impact of academic research. From a business school perspective, it has taken stock of the role of academic research and relevance in business and society. The proposed conceptual framework highlights the forces influencing the pursuit of academic rigour and relevance in…

This paper suggests that, while continuing to critically address abiding issues concerning the nature and purposes of mass education, educational research needs to embrace new contexts and emphases as we move deeper into the 21st century. These contexts and emphases--in particular those related to globalization in its various forms, and to rapid…

Transcending the low status of educational research will require demonstrating its relevance to improvements in practice. Educational progress is most likely to emerge from approaches to research that create an equal footing for practitioners and researchers, recognizing that though these groups accumulate and curate knowledge in different ways,…

Learning analytics provide a set of powerful tools to inform and support learners. They enable institutions and individuals to better understand and predict personal learning needs and performance. Universities already collect vast amounts of data about their student populations, but often this is underutilised. The current "state of the…

Since its establishment in 2002, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education has funded dozens of field-initiated efficacy and scale-up studies of interventions, released multiple evaluation studies of major policy initiatives, supported rigorous studies of programs through the Regional Educational Laboratories,…

Bayesian statistical methods have become more feasible to implement with advances in computing but are not commonly used in educational research. In contrast to frequentist approaches that take hypotheses (and the associated parameters) as fixed, Bayesian methods take data as fixed and hypotheses as random. This difference means that Bayesian…

This paper presents a research-based, theoretically-informed contribution to the debate on "impact" in educational research, and specifically a response to Gardner's 2011 presidential address to the British Educational Research Association. It begins by discussing the development of the research "impact" agenda as a global…

Interest in research utilisation in policy and practice has grown in the last few years for both academics and users. This interest is partly due to changes in higher education institutions in many countries that emphasise a research-centred approach, which prioritises the dissemination and transfer of research results to end users. The process…

Many of the researchers in research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are drawn to them because of frustrations that their work--while esteemed by academic colleagues--too infrequently influences education policies or practices. Many district partners in RPPs also have backgrounds as researchers, and they too want to see research address stubborn…

In this commentary, the author argues that there is a considerable degree of similarity between research in the hard sciences and education and that this provides a useful lens for thinking about what constitutes "rigorous" and "scientific" education research. He suggests that the fundamental property of hard science research…

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,…