The Foundation occasionally supplements its support for empirical research with targeted capacity-building grants. One such award, approved at the Foundation’s summer board meeting, will support the launch of a methods repository for assessing the use of research evidence in policy and practice:
Building and Sustaining a URE Methods Repository
Drew Gitomer and Kevin Crouse, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Gitomer and Crouse will create a repository of methodological protocols for use in empirical studies of the use of research evidence, which will serve as an open access public platform housing high-quality measures and coding schemes for adaptation and use by researchers and funders. Following the early-stage development of the repository, the team will now build out the full repository, develop supports for its use, and open it to a broad user base. The repository will be hosted on the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework collections platform, which enables methods to be linked to published papers, pre-prints, data, analyses, and analysis tools, thereby promoting more expansive use of strong methods, limiting unnecessary redundancies, and providing a centralized platform for strengthening methods. With demand growing across countries and sectors for ways to assess research impact, further contributions to the repository will yield an expansive and valuable resource for the field.
