Closing the Research-Practice Gap in Education

(Illustration by Bela Jude) 

In April 2020, Vincent Matthews needed to know how to safely reopen schools, and fast. The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) superintendent, like his peers across the United States, had recently shuttered all schools because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Matthews and his team of SFUSD administrators were working on the learning and safety protocols necessary to bring the district’s 55,000 students back to their campuses. Where could he get reliable evidence about effective school and classroom designs for reopening schools?

While a global pandemic happens once in a lifetime, education leaders regularly need evidence to guide their decision-making. They often confront a research-practice gap in the education sector—the divide between the knowledge that educators need to inform their decisions and the knowledge that educational researchers produce. Educational researchers largely pursue generalizable knowledge, whereas district decisions are highly contextualized.

To overcome this gap, Matthews and his chief of research, planning, and assessment, Ritu Khanna, turned to their partner, the Stanford University Graduate School of Education (Stanford GSE), for help. The Stanford-SFUSD Partnership brings together research and practice to improve SFUSD student achievement. The long-standing partnership matches Stanford GSE researchers with SFUSD district leaders to study problems identified by the school district that are of mutual interest.

To support SFUSD’s planning process for school reopening, the partnership director contacted Stanford GSE professors Patricia Bromley and Christine Min Wotipka about the superintendent’s need for research. Bromley and Wotipka mobilized their network of alumni from Stanford GSE’s International Comparative Education master’s program. They sought documentation on school and classroom designs from countries reopening schools in spring 2020. Bromley and Wotipka analyzed this documentation with SFUSD priorities in mind and produced a policy brief by June 2020 that informed SFUSD’s plan to reopen its schools, including focusing on proper ventilation and social distancing standards. The researchers concurrently conducted a more systematic analysis aligned with standards of the academic community and submitted an article to a journal by August 2020.

To pull off timely, policy-relevant, and scholarly research inquiries, the leaders of SFUSD and Stanford GSE encourage their staffs to work together in a research-practice
partnership (RPP). RPPs are long-term, mutually beneficial relationships focused on research related to policy makers’ and practitioners’ priorities. RPPs produce original analyses and have structured ways of working together that break down traditional job roles. In the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership, partners develop research questions collaboratively, meet to discuss preliminary findings, and establish relationships that persist long after a project ends, paving the way for future research.

By working in an RPP over the last decade, the SFUSD leaders and Stanford GSE faculty closed the research-practice gap in significant ways. This success sparked an idea in Stanford GSE leaders: Could they establish similar RPPs with school districts near Stanford’s campus? This work to extend and expand the RPP model has demonstrated its promises and challenges for helping to close the research-practice gap in education and beyond.

Mind the Gaps

The research-practice gap has three dimensions. The knowledge gap concerns knowledge produced from research, which is typically written for other academics and includes technical aspects unsuited to practitioners. Practitioners, in turn, lack the needed relationships or outlets for sharing practical knowledge with researchers. Second, the design gap stems from the high burden of proof and requisite time that researchers and designers want to assess innovations. Practitioners, by contrast, need ready solutions to their problems and are willing to accept a lower burden of proof. Third, the context gap refers to the difficulty that education leaders have in applying the research-backed practices developed in one school district context to others. The US education sector is very decentralized, with a low level of control from the federal and state leaders on which practices are happening in the 13,000 school districts across the country. This makes it hard to test and adopt practices on a wide scale that may have been designed for another context.

The Stanford-SFUSD partnership demonstrates how RPPs can address all three of these gaps. To address the knowledge gap, the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership relies on a broker—a professional whose job is to help the two institutions work together. This broker assists the individuals work across the boundaries of their institutions through regular meetings and structured communications about roles, responsibilities, and expectations. In the case of the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership, the broker is a full-time director housed in a third-party nonprofit organization, California Education Partners (Ed Partners), who sits three to four days a week at SFUSD and one to two days a week at Stanford.

To close the design gap, the partnership participants develop a “stronger together” mindset to address dynamics of power and status that can undermine trust. The mindset motivates researchers and practitioners to work together to co-design research questions and interventions, collectively understand problems, design solutions that have the ability to be implemented at scale district-wide, test solutions outside of the lab, and evaluate these solutions systematically over time. The partners are motivated to adopt such behavior when they find that, individually, they will do better work by working together.

To close the context gap, the partnership produces research that serves a dual purpose. The research is always tied to specific district contexts, but it also supports Stanford faculty’s research efforts by being formulated as (potentially) generalizable to multiple contexts and therefore of interest to academia. This creates research that is mutually beneficial for both the researchers and practitioners.

Seeding Partnerships

In 2016, when Stanford GSE Dean Dan Schwartz thought of spreading the concept of RPPs to another setting, he approached Jim Lianides, former superintendent of the nearby Sequoia Union High School District. Lianides was interested on one condition: The RPP needed to include the eight elementary school districts that fed into his own district—Belmont-Redwood Shores, Las Lomitas, Menlo Park, Portola Valley, Ravenswood, Redwood City, San Carlos, and Woodside. The school districts and Stanford GSE leaders formed the Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative (Sequoia Collaborative), an RPP with an explicit focus on conducting original research with Stanford GSE faculty. The Sequoia Collaborative brought together nine school districts that operate independently but are bound by their efforts to educate students from preschool through high school graduation.

To establish an RPP within the Sequoia Collaborative, the Stanford GSE leaders and the nine superintendents worked with a broker at Ed Partners to broaden Stanford-SFUSD’s RPP design to the new multidistrict context and again overcome the gaps. Together, the partnership learned three important lessons in refining their RPP design.

First, brokers support continuity and strong relationships. The Sequoia Collaborative has experienced a fair amount of turnover in district leadership since 2016. Often, a set of superintendents will make progress toward a shared vision, then that progress is threatened by multiple changes in the superintendency across the RPP. The broker supports continuity across the existing relationships while also working to communicate a unique vision, identity, and research agenda for the RPP to new leaders. The broker also makes sure the partners have the relationships and knowledge needed by onboarding new partners and sharing the historical knowledge of the partnership.

Second, collaborative negotiation of research is essential. Partners should collectively identify research topics and review findings. For example, the nine superintendents had multiple discussions to narrow their research agenda to one topic: supporting students whose first language is not English and who need additional language supports to access grade-level instruction. To support collaboration among the nine districts, Stanford faculty develop project timelines, communication strategies, and deliverables so that district leaders collectively review findings within and across research and practice teams.

Third, partner capacities are critical. The Sequoia Collaborative has school districts with different levels of capacities based on their size (from 600 to 9,000 students), resources (varying budgets), issues related to governance (e.g., school board politics), and researchers with different levels of experience working in RPPs. For example, some school districts needed help with organizing and sharing data, while some superintendents routinely presented findings from research to their school boards. Some projects benefited from the experience of researchers at the John W. Gardner Center at Stanford University, who had worked with some of these district leaders and specialized in such partnerships.

The experience of expanding RPPs from one context to the next has uncovered challenges and barriers. After 10 years, partners in the Stanford-SFUSD partnership sometimes have trouble developing research questions together or struggle to make research mutually beneficial. Stanford GSE has worked to overcome these tendencies by incentivizing faculty through competitive funding opportunities to conduct research with SFUSD and the Sequoia Collaborative districts on topics relevant to district leaders. SFUSD has worked to overcome these tendencies by building the capacity of their internal research department, and some Sequoia districts have hired staff with research and analysis expertise.

Research-practice gaps are not unique to the field of education. In medicine, social work, and public policy, too, practitioners are operating in realities that feel far removed from research. But the general rules we have learned from education RPPs are widely applicable. The broker’s efforts to build relationships among participants, the way participants collaboratively engage in the development and consideration of research, and the parties’ abilities to work in RPP structures are especially important for spreading RPPs from one context to another.

Read more stories by Laura Wentworth, Ritu Khanna, Michelle Nayfack & Daniel L. Schwartz.