This post is adapted from the article, “Going on a statewide listening tour: Involving education leaders in the process of research to enhance the practical value of qualitative research,” by Rebecca G. Kaplan, Robbin Riedy, Katie Van Horne, & William R. Penuel, which appeared in Evidence & Policy in March 2018.

Many policymakers and researchers wonder: How can we enhance the practical value of research findings? In our research-practice partnership (RPP) with university-based researchers and state science leaders, we tried to answer this question.

Often we think of producers and consumers of research as different groups; in this partnership, state science leaders were both. Together, researchers and education leaders took part in a participatory research process of planning, conducting, and developing findings from focus groups that involved multiple stakeholders and focused on science education. We found that this process not only resulted in immediately useful findings for education leaders, but it also shifted leaders’ perceptions of the value of the insights that qualitative data can provide for their work.

In this post, I’ll discuss why this study was promising for our field. First, I’ll touch on the issue of how research does not impact practice as often or as powerfully as researchers and policymakers would like. Next, I’ll discuss ways in which research is used by practitioners. I’ll end by sharing impacts of participation shared by our RPP participants, and takeaways for how to get more educators involved in research.

While there is strong interest in research and practice informing one another in education, research oftentimes does not make it into the work of educators. Policies such as the current federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) encourage or require education leaders to use “evidence-based” results of studies that measure the impact of policies and programs. However, educators report rarely using these kinds of results, and policy analyses have found little impact of peer-reviewed research on education policies and practices. School and district leaders report that other kinds of evidence, such as books that provide frameworks for guiding the implementation of policy, are more useful to their work than peer-reviewed impact studies.