Featured Work / Page 2

By R. Chris Sheldrick, Tom Mackie, Lauren Supplee, Gracelyn Cruden, Liz Farley-Ripple, Bill Firestone, Brittany Gay, Jonathan Purtle, Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom, on behalf of the William T. Grant Foundation Special Interest Group on the Quality of the Use of Research Evidence. For many years, the William T. Grant Foundation has funded research on ways to improve […]

The question of how to improve the use of research (URE) in policy and practice can be approached from diverse disciplinary and methodological angles. For many who study research use, attention to the challenge of URE grows naturally from an already established line of research. Other times, first-hand experience with the obstacles that prevent greater […]

True equity-oriented research must upend traditional power dynamics where university researchers are viewed as apex knowledge producers. Democratizing the knowledge production process to recognize the valued and essential contributions of both the researcher and community partners is essential for creating equitable research collaborations.

Newcomer unaccompanied youth in the U.S. The United States defines an unaccompanied minor as an immigrant who is under the age of 18 and not in the care of a parent or legal guardian at the time of entry, who is left unaccompanied after entry, and who does not have a family member or legal […]

Although there are dots that have yet to be linked explicitly, the connection between fee-for-service reimbursement models and supply-induced demand is the sort of explanation one should expect to find when looking for the connection between system structure and disparity.

Community-engaged research is not the norm for social scientists. When it comes to faculty career advancement criteria, research institutions typically value studies that advance the field and generate publications more than collaborative knowledge-building that advances the public good. But research designed to address real-time policy and practice problems can be as methodologically rigorous as any […]

“We had to ask ourselves: How do we respond to complexity that was always there but is now heightened? What knowledge is relevant in practice, and how do we produce that knowledge for use in the practice world?”

Since 2015, the William T. Grant Foundation has funded research on programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes. We have supported a diverse pool of highly accomplished researchers, including some who have produced affirmative causal evidence on specific ways to reduce inequality (and others who have provided equally valuable evidence on what […]

By bringing together university researchers with practitioners and community members, RPPs in education help to ensure that the processes and outcomes of research directly enrich educational practice and policy in ways that community members most desire.

Even to a casual observer, the research-practice partnerships “tent” has expanded considerably since the seminal 2013 paper by Coburn et al., Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts.

RPPs have the potential to forge relationships that lead to new possibilities for racial justice. However, they also run the risk of reproducing the very inequities that many claim to challenge. To avoid the second scenario, we need to confront racial injustice directly and build RPPs that are committed to dismantling it.

Research-Practice Partnerships in Education: The State of the Field expands on the 2013 white paper Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts by scanning the current landscape of partnerships, identifying points of variation, and outlining shared principles.

At UC-Berkeley, where I trained in clinical-community psychology and have served as a professor for almost two decades, our recent strategic plan framed our public mission as: …a commitment to egalitarian and democratic values; to research and scholarly work that serves our community, our state, our nation, and the world; to providing access for students […]

In partnership with the Spencer Foundation and the Forum for Youth Investment, on June 10, we hosted a 90 minute panel discussion, “Power, Possibility, and Equity in Research Practice Partnerships.” RPPs have been an important approach to research that seeks to center issues of practice and the voices of educators in the research process by […]

Since 2014, the Foundation has focused much of its grantmaking toward supporting studies that examine programs, policies, and practices to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. Subtle as it is, the nuance here—calling for researchers to investigate specific strategies that can ameliorate unequal outcomes—nevertheless represents a pivot from the long tradition of social science research that […]