The fifth issue of the William T. Grant Foundation Digest features insights from program staff and grantees on the importance of looking beneath the surface to consider the underlying factors that create and shape challenges that social scientists seek to address, whether they be related to reducing inequality in youth outcomes or improving the use of research evidence in policy and practice.
Improving the use of research evidence will require ensuring usefulness—and use—toward ends that are congruent with the goals and visions that marginalized communities have for their self-determined benefits.
We can no more afford methodologically rich research studies that lack racial consciousness than we can afford racially conscious studies that lack methodological rigor.
To begin shifting the underlying structures of inequality, scholars can harness the power of rigorous research to produce innovative, ground-breaking research that might further upend the narratives that inequality is inevitable or explained by individual differences.
What is needed is not a one-off intervention, but an informed understanding of how racism makes its way into encounters between youth and police and a commitment to addressing the …
The ninth issue of the Digest features an update on the Institutional Challenge Grant program five years after its launch, with insights from a Foundation stock-taking effort and reflections from two grantee teams. We also share new thinking on the use of research evidence, including ways for researchers to leverage existing findings to bolster studies of effective strategies to improve research use.
The Digest
Issue 8: Winter 2022-23
The eighth issue of the Digest features insights about where new research might help identify ways to reduce inequality in youth outcomes after COVID-19, as well as how the fields of implementation science and research on research use might learn from each other in ways that yield more transformative research in years ahead.
The Digest
Issue 7: Winter 2021-22
The seventh issue of the Digest includes fresh insights from program staff and grantees on how researchers can successfully confront the challenges of studying causal mechanisms for reducing inequality, as well as how the global community of researchers and funders focused on improving the use of research evidence can continue to break new ground in the years ahead.
The Digest
Issue 6: Winter 2020-21
Essays in this issue of the Digest focus on the importance of looking beyond individual action and customary metrics in research on reducing inequality, as well as how strengths-based, race-conscious research can be produced and used to uplift communities of color.
The Digest
Issue 4: Winter 2018/19
The fourth issue of the William T. Grant Foundation Digest features insights that may point the way toward a more nuanced understanding of evidence use and inspire new and more wide-ranging examinations of ways to reduce inequality in youth outcomes.
The Digest
Issue 3: Winter 2017/18
The third issue of the William T. Grant Foundation Digest features insights on how research on ability tracking can inform studies to improve the outcomes of English learners, as well as how researchers and school districts can partner to build learning systems based on research evidence.
The Digest
Issue 2: Spring 2017
The second issue of the William T. Grant Foundation Digest features writing on research rigor and relevance, as well as the potential for a new research agenda for improving the outcomes of English learners under the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The Digest
Issue 1: Summer 2016
The introductory issue of the William T. Grant Foundation Digest features essays and commentary on the value of qualitative and mixed-methods research in reducing inequality and the potential for researcher access to big data to yield useful research evidence.
The William T. Grant Foundation invests in high-quality research focused on reducing inequality in youth outcomes and improving the use of research evidence in decisions that affect young people in the United States.
