Featured Work / Page 3
As the shock of the current health and economic crisis takes a heavy toll on millions of Americans employed in the service sector, we must remember that millions of children are also vulnerable to dire consequences.
In a recent interview we conducted with a congressional aide, she remarked that she was often inundated with research when working on a new policy issue. The aide’s primary goal in seeking out research evidence was to bring a new perspective to how her team was thinking through a given policy issue. This type of research use, wherein the research is a source of ideas, information, and orientations, is frequently defined as conceptual use of research.
If we hope to train practitioners to use new interventions with fidelity, it may be necessary to first explicitly differentiate between previous and new instructional practices.
How School Finance Research Can Sharpen the Debate, Strengthen Policy, and Improve Student Outcomes
New research has the potential not only to shape the school finance debate in years ahead, but improve policies and ultimately reduce inequalities in student opportunities and outcomes.
In this chapter from What Works Now: Evidence-informed Policy and Practice, Vivian Tseng and Cynthia Coburn delineate the evolution of evidence use in the United States, specifically the ways that research evidence has been used in public education. From the narrow focus of the What Works agenda to the emergence of more holistic conceptions of […]
In June 2019, Michigan’s Attorney General dismissed all criminal cases connected to the Flint water crisis. This crisis, which hit the headline news in early 2016, exposed as many as 8,000 children under age six to extreme lead levels in drinking water. Many Americans were left wondering: What effect would this have on the community, […]
For over three decades, research has shown that young people transitioning to adulthood from foster care in the United States have fared very poorly compared to their peers who have not been in care. This is the case across measures of well-being including educational attainment, employment and earnings, material hardship, and criminal justice system involvement. […]
The Institutional Challenge Grant has provided my colleagues and I at the Cornell Cooperative Extension-Tompkins County with an opportunity to expand an existing working relationship with researchers from Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology and work in partnership to develop strategies for mitigating the impact of the opioid epidemic on families and communities in upstate […]
When well executed, research-practice partnerships can be powerful mechanisms for producing relevant and useful knowledge and facilitating its integration into policy and practice to improve youth outcomes. But without taking intentional steps to avoid common hurdles, it’s likely that many partnerships will fail to fulfill this potential. In Five Ways RPPs Can Fail and How […]
Photovoice provides a platform for members of communities to share their narratives and articulate the assets and needs of their neighborhoods. This method can enable youth to promote critical conversations and move their neighbors toward collective identification of problems and solutions.
How Do You Get Academia to Value Education Research-Practitioner Partnerships? Make a Tenure Track
In EdWeek, Sarah D. Sparks talks to new Institutional Challenge Grant co-PI Allison Atteberry about how relationships between researchers and district leaders are evolving.
In Studying the Use of Research Evidence: A Review of Methods, Drew Gitomer and Kevin Crouse highlight measures and methods from a range of methodological traditions that have been employed by researchers to assess the use of research evidence in disparate policy and practice domains, including education, child welfare, and public health. The report outlines […]
With funding from the William T. Grant Foundation, I have been engaged in a multi-year evaluation with the Boston Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development to assess the impact of the city’s summer jobs program on criminal justice, academic and employment outcomes.
While the longstanding structural challenges in the professional development of junior scholars of color can be confronted through strong mentoring relationships, the potential power of effective mentoring will only be realized when the environments in which these relationships exist begin to change. Derived from insights gleaned from grantees of the William T. Grant Foundation’s mentoring […]
Youth organizing efforts are opportunities for adults in key positions of leadership to hear, reflect on, and partner with youth to reduce inequity in schools for marginalized youth of color.