Presidential Essay - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Presidential Essay

Carrie Conaway

Graduate School of Education

Harvard Universität

Cambridge, MA 02138

carrie_conaway@gse.harvard

.edu

MAXIMIZING RESEARCH USE IN THE WORLD

WE ACTUALLY LIVE IN: RELATIONSHIPS,

ORGANIZATIONS, AND INTERPRETATION

When I started my job as research director of the Massachusetts
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education twelve
years ago, I thought my job was to ﬁgure out what worked. Mein
agency was just beginning to have access to new and exciting lon-
gitudinal data on students and educators. I envisioned that I’d
use those data along with strong designs for causal inference to
determine which programs and policies were working and which
were not. Once we knew those answers, I ﬁgured, we would get
better policy that would improve outcomes for Massachusetts’
students.

But in my twelve years in this job, I’ve learned that the process
of improving policy1 through research is much subtler and more
complex than I had initially imagined. Research inﬂuences policy
more often than much of the academic community thinks, Und
more frequently every day as we learn how to do this work better.
But its inﬂuence is less linear than researchers expect, and it is
driven as much by relationships and organizational capacity as
by the actual information studies produce. Research use operates
through conversations, not code; structures in organizations, nicht
standard errors; Beziehungen, not randomized controlled trials.
I worry that the growing national eﬀorts to connect research
and policy too frequently start from the same “ﬁnd what works”
frame of mind that I did twelve years ago. The “ﬁnd what works”
approach misunderstands the problem of research use as one of
lack of information—either lack of information about the impact
of a policy or lack of awareness by the policy maker about the
available information—and a need for “translation” across sec-
tors (Penuel et al. 2015). This belies the research literature about
how research actually plays into the policy decision process. Wenn

1. This essay centers on the inﬂuence of research on policy, rather than practice. This is both because I have more
expertise in the policy process than I do in issues of direct practice and because AEFP members’ research tends
to focus more on policy. I suspect, Jedoch, that many of the same insights would also apply in practice settings.

https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00299

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Maximizing Research Use

research is insuﬃciently used in policy making, it’s because we have too few conversa-
tions between the policy and research communities, not because we have too few policy
briefs.

The research on research use is clear: If we want research to matter for policy, Wir
need to devote resources to building relationships and strengthening organizational
practices in service of building organizations that learn. This will require researchers,
universities, policy makers, practitioners, and professional associations like the Asso-
ciation for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) to reconsider their activities and prior-
ities and create new ways of working across sectors. This work will be complex, messy,
and at times uncomfortable. But it is work worth doing.

H OW R E S E A R C H I N F L U E N C E S P O L I C Y
The irony of my early years in my role is that if I had stopped to read the research on
how research is used in policy making, I might have become eﬀective in my role much
faster. Decades of studies on this topic, starting with Carol Weiss’s groundbreaking
work in the 1970s and 1980s, shed light on when and how research is used to eﬀect
organizational and political change (Weiss 1977, 1980, 1982).

A key ﬁnding from this literature is that decision making is a process, not an event.
Policy makers don’t just mark oﬀ their calendar for “Decision Day.” They gather infor-
mation on an issue over time and from a variety of sources, often in the absence of a
speciﬁc pending decision. They make initial choices when decision opportunities arise,
and they adjust course in an iterative process (Weiss 1980, 1982; Kingdon 1984). Fur-
ther, their decisions tend to be less about choosing between programs and more about
designing a new system or process for a speciﬁc context (Penuel et al. 2017, 2018). Nor,
übrigens, is there a singular decision maker. Legislators, bureaucrats, advocates,
consultants, and others all play a role in the policy development and implementation
Verfahren. Decisions “accrete through small uncoordinated steps taken in many oﬃces”
(Weiss 1980, P. 382).

In der Tat, this is how decisions are made in any organization, not just state houses
and school districts. Suppose, Zum Beispiel, that a university was considering creating a
new doctoral program in education policy. Conversations about whether to pursue this
would probably take place over several years, with many diﬀerent stakeholders from
across the university community weighing in. Program designers would gather infor-
mation from prior research, but also from other universities with similar programs,
funders, student enrollment and market conditions, und so weiter. The moment when
the provost or president approved the program would be the culmination of years of
incremental discussions and decisions, each of which subtly inﬂuenced the ultimate
outcome. And that process would continue even after the decision was made, as the
program was implemented and the department learned which dimensions were suc-
ceeding or needed improvement.

It should be no surprise to researchers, Dann, that policy decisions work exactly the
same way. Insights from research certainly weigh in policy makers’ minds, but so too
do many other factors—personal and community values, constituent concerns, bud-
gets, legal constraints, und so weiter (Weiss 1982). In der Tat, that is how a democratic system
is supposed to work. Policy makers’ jobs are to consider the available information on

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Carrie Conaway

an issue and use that information in conjunction with their values and professional
judgment to make decisions (Brighouse et al. 2018).

Research may inform those judgments directly, through what Carol Weiss calls “in-
strumental” use of research (1977). This type of use is what I had in mind when I arrived
to my agency—using ﬁndings from particular studies to determine next steps for policy
Entwicklung. But just as often, research informs decisions indirectly, by creating new
frameworks or ways of thinking about problems. Weiss calls this “conceptual” or “en-
lightenment” use (Weiss 1977, 1980). This can take diﬀerent forms, such as introducing
new concepts, seeing problems in a new light, shifting understandings about possible
Lösungen, or providing a framework to guide action (Farrell and Coburn 2016b). Weiss
argues that “the major eﬀect of research on policy may be the gradual sedimentation
of insights, theories, concepts, and ways of looking at the world” (1977, P. 535).

How do policy makers gain access to insights from research? A recent study by the
National Center for Research on Policy and Practice sheds light. Surveying a nation-
ally representative sample of district leaders in midsize and large districts, the report
ﬁnds that both the format and the messenger are critical. When asked to cite a piece
of research that inﬂuenced their work, 58 percent of respondents cited a book; the next
most common was a policy report, bei 17 Prozent. Individual articles from peer-reviewed
journals were even less frequently cited (Penuel et al. 2018). Respondents also rarely
reported learning about research directly from researchers, instead relying on trusted,
known intermediaries. The most common way that district respondents reported ac-
cessing research “often” or “all the time” was through their professional associations,
bei 53 Prozent. Conferences came in next at 40 Prozent; people in other school districts
third at 39 Prozent (Penuel et al. 2017). Formal resources aimed at providing infor-
mation to practitioners but lacking sustained personal connections, such as the What
Works Clearinghouse and the Regional Education Laboratories, and translators of re-
search such as print or social media, were used at less than half these rates.

Organizational context and structure can also advance research use. Where research
use is most sophisticated, policy makers may gain access to research through a per-
son who sits between the research and policy communities, often referred to in this
literature as a broker or boundary-spanner (Penuel et al. 2015). Brokers engage in “in-
tentional eﬀorts . . . to make space for and enter into joint work with partners whose
work involves responsibilities, expertise, pressures, and strategies diﬀerent from one’s
own” (Penuel et al. 2015, P. 190). They create organizational norms and routines that
allow for connections across perspectives, and they push people beyond their comfort
zone in service of advancing the partnership’s goals. By doing so, they help span gaps
in perspective and values across professional communities and ﬁnd productive ways
for them to work together (Farley-Ripple et al. 2018). They also increase the absorptive
capacity of organizations—that is, their ability to interpret and act on ﬁndings from
Forschung (Farrell and Coburn 2016a). At their best, brokers help organizations learn.

M A X I M I Z I N G R E S E A R C H U S E I N T H E WO R L D W E AC T UA L LY L I V E I N
Instead of beginning with a model of decision making as Decision Day, let us in-
stead begin with a model of decision making as it happens in the real world: arbeiten-
ing through relationships, embedded in organizations, inﬂuenced by information from

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Maximizing Research Use

many sources, and evolving over time. If this is how policy decisions are made, Dann
the next question for the research community is: What is the best way to maximize the
inﬂuence of research on this untidy, indirect process?

The crucial insight from the research literature is this: Research use is relational,
organizational, and interpretive. To have impact, research must be embedded in orga-
nizational structures and personal, trusting relationships that give policy makers space
to interpret research and construct their own meaning from it (Coburn 2018; Farley-
Ripple et al. 2018; Farrell, Coburn, and Chong 2018). Gott sei Dank, several promising new
strategies for addressing this issue have emerged—ones that explicitly acknowledge the
role of relationships, Organisationen, and interpretation in helping policy makers to use
information more eﬀectively. AEFP is playing an important role in promoting and sus-
taining these new models.

N E T WO R K S A N D P RO F E S S I O N A L A S S O C I AT I O N S
If relationships among people are how research use happens, then networks and pro-
fessional associations are linchpins in that process. And if the goal is to drive research
use among policy makers, then an obvious ﬁrst step is to put policy makers and re-
searchers in the same room.

AEFP is the only professional policy research association I am aware of that has
sought out grant funding to bring policy makers and practitioners to its conference, rec-
ognizing that travel funds are often limited for public sector employees. In der Vergangenheit
three years we have supported travel costs for well over one hundred policy makers to
attend the conference. We also created Policy Talks, a new type of session that identiﬁes
the broad themes or ﬁndings in an area of research and creates a conversation between
policy makers and researchers on those issues. And we created the Ambassadors Break-
fast, in part to give policy makers and researchers an opportunity to interact informally
around shared interests and begin to build personal connections early in the confer-
enz. Since making these shifts, we have seen association membership double among
policy makers.

We have also become more strategic in identifying two types of people working in
policy and practice that would most beneﬁt from AEFP conference attendance: the peo-
ple leading an agency’s research eﬀorts, and the people who work in research-related
roles at policy associations, such as the Council of Chief State School Oﬃcers or Ed-
ucation Commission of the States. These are brokering and boundary-spanning roles;
people in them need to connect with the research community to do their work well.
Although the content presented at AEFP may sometimes be too narrow for a typical
superintendent or commissioner, it is invaluable for a research director trying to stay
up to speed on the latest research in the priority areas for her district or state, or for a
person charged with organizing policy conferences who needs to ﬁnd experts as panel
members or advisors. We are now prioritizing our travel funds and other connecting
activities on supporting these two types of practitioners.

We are working to build stronger connections with education policy associations,
to create more structural opportunities for the policy and research communities to
interagieren. For the ﬁrst time this year, we asked these associations to weigh in on pri-
ority topics for the policy talks, to work toward the goal of having the content at the

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Carrie Conaway

conference reﬂect both the best research and current policy needs. We are also con-
vening an advisory group of staﬀ from organizations that connect researchers and
practitioners to discuss how we can build stronger, sustained relationships across our
associations.

E M B E D D E D R E S E A R C H D I R E C TO R S
I doubt my agency had read the research on research brokers or absorptive capacity
before creating my position in Massachusetts; schließlich, they had no broker to bring
it to their attention. dennoch, a broker was exactly what they created—an internal
role fostering relationships between policy makers and researchers and shifting orga-
nizational practices in a way that increased the ability of the agency to use research
eﬀectively.

Situating this type of role internal to an organization allows the research director
to be more aware of the current policy issues and, crucially, more connected to the
agency’s needs and ongoing routines. I oﬀer some “anecdata” to make my case. Last
Jahr, I forwarded to my deputy commissioner some materials on options for measuring
student growth. He wrote back, “Many people send me articles that I have neither the
time nor the inclination to read. What’s annoying about you is that the articles you send
are so on point to the work we’re doing that I feel compelled to read them.” I could not
have annoyed my deputy nearly as eﬀectively if my role were not deeply ingrained in
the agency’s work.

Natürlich, embedded research directors can only be eﬀective to the degree their
positions are given the positional and relational authority to inﬂuence organizational
üben. Siloed away from decision makers, operating only within one policy oﬃce or
division, or given too many responsibilities for time-sensitive, intensive work (wie zum Beispiel
assessment or accountability), they cannot hope to increase the organization’s overall
capacity to build and use research evidence (Conaway 2015; Schwartz 2015). Umgekehrt,
when placed into a supportive structure, embedding a research director is one of the
most eﬀective ways for organizations to accelerate this work.

AEFP has furthered the professional development of research directors by giving
us a space to connect with one another. Research director roles have been relatively
common, though not ubiquitous, in larger school districts for a while now. But when
I started in my role twelve years ago, I was the only state education agency research
director of this type in the nation. I was what Dan Goldhaber memorably described as
a “golden unicorn”—that rare person working in a policy or practice setting who has
“an excellent grasp of what constitutes good research” (Goldhaber 2018).

I may have been a unicorn, but I was alone in the forest until Nate Schwartz came
along. Nate joined the Tennessee Department of Education in a role comparable to mine
in July 2012. That single connection to another person doing similar work dramatically
improved my own. It allowed me to reﬂect on my own practice and gave me access
to new ideas, strategies, and opportunities that I could then adapt and implement in
my own setting. Now the golden unicorns extend nationally into at least ﬁfteen states
and many more districts, as well as higher education settings. We have even begun an
informal Golden Unicorn Society at the AEFP conference to share common challenges
and concerns, and support one another in our work. One unicorn is already something
special, but a group of unicorns is—literally and ﬁguratively—a blessing.

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Maximizing Research Use

R E S E A R C H – P R AC T I C E PA R T N E R S H I P S
An increasingly popular strategy for conducting policy research with impact is via
research–practice partnerships (RPPs), deﬁned by Coburn and Penuel (2016) as “long-
term collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are organized to inves-
tigate problems of practice and solutions for improving schools and districts” (P. 48).
RPPs diﬀer from traditional research models in part by focusing on the problems
practitioners want to solve rather than the questions researchers want to answer. Aber
they also diﬀer by explicitly elevating and supporting the relationship side of research
use. They are intentionally organized to build sustained relationships between re-
searchers and practitioners as a means of improving practice. Some RPPs are formal
and institutionalized—for example, the longstanding Chicago Consortium on School
Research or many of the other members of the National Network of Education-Research
Practice Partnerships. But RPPs can also be thought of as an orientation toward the
work—a more collaborative, relationship-based approach to conducting research that
could apply in any policy or practice setting.

Most RPPs are designed to improve outcomes for students while simultaneously
improving access to, and use of, research in education organizations, and the relevance
of research conducted by partners. The research on whether they attain these goals is
nascent, and the nature of the intervention does not lend itself easily to causal inference
(Coburn and Penuel 2016). But another National Center for Research in Policy and
Practice study, one of the winners of Institute of Education Sciences RPP grants, lends
some insight on the organizational changes that may occur through RPPs (Farrell et al.
2018).

The study ﬁnds that “the majority of practitioners reported becoming better at us-
ing research in their work and were more likely to do so because of their participation
in the partnership. Almost all of the researchers agreed that they had become better at
conducting research that meets the needs of practitioners” (Farrell et al. 2018, P. 3). In-
terviews with RPP participants revealed that “both education leaders and researchers
reported shifts in three key areas: their orientation toward research, ihr Wissen
and skills about the research process, and their communication practices with stake-
holders.” Further, their peers on the other side of the partnership also observed these
changes (Davidson 2018).

RPPs are not the solution to all our research impact woes. They are not appropriate
for all research questions—some require a more distant, hands-oﬀ relationship, Und
some don’t merit the deep investment of time and eﬀort necessary for an RPP to ﬂour-
ish. They are resource-intensive and thus tend to privilege more senior researchers
(who worry less about getting publications for tenure), and larger education organiza-
tionen (which tend to have greater administrative capacity for research and larger sample
sizes that make inferential statistics more useful). And, they can be challenging to im-
plement and sustain, precisely because they push the traditional boundaries of research
and practice.

But having participated in several RPPs myself, I can attest to their value for chang-
ing how agencies use research evidence, particularly when the RPP is focused on a topic
of long-term strategic interest for policy making. I can also attest to their impact on the
relevance of research conducted by the research partners. As researchers become more
connected to and embedded in organizations, they are better able to identify questions

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Carrie Conaway

that practitioners value answering and ﬁnd ways to include those questions in their
research agendas.

Der 2019 AEFP conference featured research from RPPs such as the Education
Research Alliance at Tulane, the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan
Zustand, the Tennessee Education Research Alliance at Vanderbilt, und viele andere. Das
demonstrates that a focus on questions of practice need not imply that the resulting
work is less valuable to the research community.

F RO M O R G A N I Z AT I O N S T H AT D O TO O R G A N I Z AT I O N S T H AT L E A R N
All of these strategies hold great promise for increasing the inﬂuence of research on
Politik. But I think we can push even further. What if the research community thought
of our end goal not as getting ideas from research into policy decisions, but as helping
policy and practice organizations shift from organizations that do to organizations that
learn?

Our whole way of approaching our work would be diﬀerent. We would recognize
that the most eﬀective way to build systematic capacity to learn is through sustained
connections across organizations and people. daher, we would value the time we
spend on building relationships that allow us to ask meaningful questions and learn
from their answers as much as we value the time we spend on producing research itself.
We would appreciate that it is these relationships that allow ideas from research to take
root.

We would see that the research community’s contribution operates as much
through its structured approach to learning as through any speciﬁc knowledge it gen-
erates. We would take advantage of that by collaborating to build structured approaches
to learning within education organizations, supported through strategically positioned
research brokers and partnerships. Crucially, these approaches would include organi-
zational routines that allow policy makers and practitioners to make meaning from
research and take appropriate action. Through all of this eﬀort, ideas would diﬀuse or-
ganically across the policy and research communities, enriching both and making both
more eﬀective than they would otherwise have been (Gordon, Palmer, and Darling-
Hammond 2019).

Enacting this vision would require change on the part of education agencies, In-
dividual researchers, universities, and professional associations like AEFP. Education
agencies, whether states or districts, would need to invest in greater capacity for build-
ing and using evidence as a core part of their work. This capacity could come in a
variety of forms: Zum Beispiel, training in the principles of evidence use; embedded
research directors; and/or research partnerships. But the expectation should be that
all educators are capable of evaluating evidence and using it to improve their orga-
nizations. The Institute for Education Sciences could play a role by catalyzing these
investments through research partnership and training grants and by directly funding
the embedded research directors that we know can dramatically shift organizational
Praktiken Methoden Ausübungen.

The work of individual researchers who want to help organizations learn would
shift toward one of several pathways to impact. Some researchers might participate
directly in building structured approaches to learning by serving as embedded research

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Maximizing Research Use

directors, brokers, and/or research partners themselves. But even researchers outside
those roles could still inﬂuence organizational learning. Those who are working with a
district or state to conduct a study could prioritize creating routines that create space for
sharing preliminary ﬁndings and discussing and interpreting results, in the same way
that a formal broker would insist upon. Others could consider writing a book, framing
Artikel, or broad, nontechnical pieces about their ﬁeld of inquiry that could help shift
policy makers’ thinking, or they could share their work through policy talks here at
AEFP or at local or national meetings of policy makers.

Universities would need to shift in two ways. Erste, they would need to reconsider the
balance of how diﬀerent types of output are valued by their institutions, to put greater
emphasis on eﬀort spent on impact outside the ivory tower. At a time when the value
of higher education is increasingly questioned, this would be a direct way to demon-
strate the university’s impact in the community. For inspiration, they might look to the
Research Excellence Framework, which the United Kingdom uses to assess the quality
of research output from its institutes of higher education. Impact is explicitly included
as a criterion, and the United Kingdom has developed nuanced ways of measuring
impact across the full range of academic disciplines (Research Excellence Framework
2019).

Zweite, universities would need to create opportunities for researchers, policy mak-
ers, and practitioners to learn the skills needed to do this work. Im Augenblick, people learn
this the hard way, through investing a substantial amount of time and making mistakes
along the way. Education organizations could much more quickly learn how to learn if
their own staﬀ and their research partners were explicitly trained in these skills. Das
includes how to use and build evidence as part of program and policy development, Wie
to design a collaborative learning agenda, how to critically evaluate whether research is
convincing and relevant, how to incorporate research into improvement processes, Wie
to broker relationships across research and practice organizations, und so weiter. Training
opportunities could range from short professional development or workshop opportu-
nities for existing practitioners and researchers to full degree programs for masters or
doctoral students preparing for these roles.

Professional associations like AEFP would play a unique role in this work. AEFP
has been leading the way nationally with its eﬀorts to make its content more directly
relevant and appealing to policy makers and practitioners, and to explicitly seek them
out as attendees and participants. If we want to increase the inﬂuence of research on
Politik, we need to redouble our eﬀorts to invest in building strong relationships be-
tween these new attendees and our historically research-oriented membership. We can
become one of the few spaces where perspectives from policy makers, practitioners,
and research are all valued and where connections can be built across sectors. And we
can demonstrate for others the beneﬁts of taking this approach.

AEFP’s mission is to promote understanding of the means by which resources are
generated, distributed, and used to enhance human learning. To achieve our mission,
we need to broaden our conception of “promoting understanding” to include the rela-
tional, organizational, and interpretive activities I have described in this essay. Society
has invested tremendous resources in both education and research. We will maximize
the return on that investment when we move beyond simplistic models of increasing
research use to a model of building educational organizations that learn.

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Carrie Conaway

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I beneﬁted from conversations with many people in the development of the themes in this
essay. Caitlin Farrell, Dan Goldhaber, Nora Gordon, Bob Lee, Andy Porter, and Nate Schwartz
kindly read drafts and provided numerous helpful suggestions. Others whose input inﬂuenced
my thinking include Paula Arce-Trigatti, Laura Booker, John Easton, Liz Farley-Ripple, Steve
Fleischman, Venessa Keesler, Sara Kerr, Antoniya Marinova, Bill Penuel, Morgan Polikoﬀ, Vi-
vian Tseng, and the Results for America State Education Fellows. I wrote this essay when I was
the Chief Strategy and Research Oﬃcer at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and
Secondary Education. I thank my colleagues at the agency for their generosity of time and spirit,
and for the value they place on research in guiding their work. I dedicate this essay to our late
commissioner, Mitchell Chester, who was as evidence-based a public servant as one could ever
hope to work for.

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