Academic researchers dedicated to contributing to quality improvement in professional practice need to find more effective ways to bridge the gap between research and practice. Bridging the gap requires understanding what encourages the use of research findings by practitioners and what discourages it, as well as understanding how practitioners…

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,…

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…

This study investigates the decision-making inputs, processes, and practices around the acquisition of technology to facilitate teaching and learning at institutions of higher education. The goals of this study were four-fold: to understand the factors and sources that influence decisions about educational technology (EdTech) acquisition and use…

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…

It is well documented that classroom observation reports are used by school leaders as just one piece of the clinical supervision process of teachers (Cohen and Goldhaber, 2016). While the frequency of classroom observations might vary between school districts, recent regulations on Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) have added more…

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,…

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.…

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…

Recent advances in conceptualizing structures of influence in education policymaking have emphasized the role of nongovernmental actors working in networks to promote their agendas. These useful insights have allowed researchers to consider the evolution from "government" to "governance" in education policymaking, broadening…

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…

The knowledge value chain has multiple stakeholders such as researchers and policy-makers. These are conventionally knowledge producers and knowledge users, respectively. Knowledge producers and knowledge users sometimes have conflicting interests, expectations, concerns, and priorities. To mitigate these differences, one of the strategies used is…