IES Blog

Institute of Education Sciences

Rethinking Connections Between Research and Practice in Education

IES-funded researchers from the Center for Research Use in Education (CRUE) at the University of Delaware recently learned that their article, “Rethinking Connections Between Research and Practice in Education: A Conceptual Framework,” was the 8th most-read article in any AERA journal in 2018!

In the article, the authors argue that “Recent efforts to improve the quality and availability of scientific research in education, coupled with increased expectations for the use of research in practice, demand new ways of thinking about connections between research and practice.”

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), education leaders must use evidence to inform their practice. However, the CRUE researchers argue that this simple framing “risks reducing evidence use to an administrative task rather than multiple activities constituting a political and social practice within a complex organizational process.” In fact, “the field lacks a comprehensive understanding of what evidence-based decision-making looks like in practice—for example, when is evidence brought into the decision-making process? Who engages with it? How is it understood in the local context? How often is it reviewed?”

CRUE’s research on this issue reveals gaps in the assumptions and perspectives of the research and practice communities, including the usefulness of research products; the nature and quality of research; the problems that research addresses; the structures, processes, and incentives for research production and use; and the specific relationships between the communities. They present a conceptual framework that highlights how these differences in understanding affect both the depth of research use and the depth of research production. Their article in Educational Researcher explains each of these and how they work together.

The framework shows that increasing education research use in practice is a complex, bidirectional issue, in which characteristics of both communities play a part: researchers need to produce work that is “decision-relevant,” and practitioners need to make decisions that are “research-attuned.”