William Thomas Grant Foundation

Research that better aligns policy, practice, and research communities is gaining momentum around the world. This includes engaged research strategies that bring partners, and their diverse perspectives and kinds of knowledge, together to shape research agendas with on-the-ground-needs and to create dynamic problem-solving processes. These approaches aim to generate more equitable and effective solutions to societal challenges. Although many of these partnered strategies have a longstanding history, entrenched research cultures, practices, and institutional structures stand in the way of scaling them. Given the outsized role funders play in shaping research efforts, funders are a critical lever for change. This perspective describes the efforts of a global collaborative of philanthropic and public funders who are adapting their practices, supporting the development of infrastructure (e.g., capacity-strengthening, facilitation expertise, processes to guide relational work, etc.), and targeting system-level challenges to enable engaged research to maximize its potential. The authors integrate insights from different issue areas, geographies, and funding areas to provide concrete examples of funder activities that support engaged research and to suggest areas for further action. Recommendations include scaling changes in funding practices, deepening understanding of how and when engaged research leads to improved outcomes, and reshaping how success is defined and measured.

Abstract There is a well‐known gap between research and practice. While there are investments in some strategies to address this gap, they are often not drawing from the existing research on how to improve research use. This article shares what we understand about the many ways research is used in education, why educators may use research, and under what conditions research is used in policy and practice. If scientists understand the levers that support research use, they may be able to create research that is more useful to decision‐makers and share that research through effective strategies such as using boundary spanners, individuals who straddle both the research and practice worlds. The article concludes by sharing some examples of promising strategies to improve the use of research in education such as research–practice partnerships.

For more than a century, educators have struggled to find the best way to organize instruction for students who vary widely in their prior levels of performance (1). In a pioneering line of research focused on children in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Nomi, Raudenbush, and Smith have provided fresh evidence on this age-old problem, and their latest contribution does so with long-term evidence on the consequences of high school classroom organization and instructional time for college-level outcomes (2). This is a rare feat in a field that all too often focuses on short-term gains and losses in achievement with little direct knowledge of long-term consequences (3). All groups of students exhibit variation, and, because effective teaching meets students at their own starting points and carries them forward (4), instructing students who begin at different starting points can be challenging. In response, schools commonly arrange students into instructional groupings that are more homogeneous in skill level than the age cohort as a whole. This is a common strategy among client-serving organizations: Hospitals, for example, arrange patients by category of medical need, and law firms often differentiate clients by their legal contexts. Unfortunately, this approach in education, often referred to as “tracking,” is problematic for two reasons. First, teachers who instruct students in low tracks often provide lower-quality instruction than occurs in other tracks, due to a combination of circumstances including low expectations, less experienced teachers, weak curricular materials, and a slower pace of instruction (5⇓⇓–8). As a result, students assigned to low tracks are not remediated, but, instead, fall farther and farther behind. Second, because of racism, discrimination, and economic inequality in the wider society, which affect children’s observed skills as they enter school, when schools differentiate students on the basis of prior test scores, … [↵][1]1Email: agamoran{at}wtgrantfdn.org. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

P eople have long bemoaned the silos of research and practice.Researchers express frustration that practitioners do not use or misuse research.Practitioners respond that research is not relevant to their work, or is not easily accessible or understood.Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) across the country are seeking to undo these patterns.Many partnerships involve agencies working in longterm collaboration with external researchers.Others are partnerships between research and program offi ces within government agencies.In this paper, we discuss how partnerships challenge researchers and practitioners to work together in new ways in order to improve education and human services, and ultimately to enhance child and youth outcomes.Discussion covers various types of partnerships, strategies and conditions for success, and exemplar models.

With this Special Section, the Asian Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development seeks to promote a more inclusive, expanded, and holistic developmental science that can account for the diversity of developmental trajectories among Asian Americans. The articles elucidate, in turn, historical, conceptual, and methodological issues in studying Asian American child development. Although the articles foreground Asian Americans, the ideas should help advance theoretical and empirical work for other racial and ethnic groups, thereby contributing to a more valid understanding of child development.

School racial composition has modest effects on test score gaps, but evidence of a longer-term impact is scarce. Perpetuation theory suggests that blacks who attend schools with higher proportions of white classmates may have better job outcomes. Multilevel analyses of two national longitudinal surveys reveal no effects of high school racial composition on occupational status, employment, or annual earnings for blacks or whites. For other minority groups, attending schools with more whites impedes occupational advancement. For all groups, however, school racial composition predicts workplace racial composition: Whites who attend high schools with higher proportions of white students have higher proportions of white coworkers, while nonwhites who attend schools with higher proportions of whites have fewer same-race coworkers. The findings are modest in size but robust to alternative specifications, and sensitivity analyses support a causal interpretation for same-race coworkers. These results support perpetuation theory for workplace composition but not for stratification outcomes.

Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates the benefits of self-affirmation for black and Hispanic students’ grades, with partial support among standardized achievement outcomes. Self-affirmation reduced the very large racial achievement gap in overall grade point average by 12.5 percent in high-threat school contexts and had no effect in low-threat contexts. These self-affirmation activities have the potential to help close some of the largest racial/ethnic achievement gaps, though only in specific school contexts.

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The authors present a multi-level framework for conceptualizing and designing measurement systems to improve decision-making in the treatment and prevention of child and adolescent mental health problems as well as the promotion of well-being. Also included is a description of the recommended drivers of the development and refinement of these measurement systems and the importance of the architecture upon which these measurement systems are built. The authors conclude with a set of recommendations for the next steps for the field.

In this paper, we argue that attempts to change social settings have been hindered by lack of theoretical advances in understanding key aspects of social settings and how they work in a dynamic system. We present a systems framework for understanding youths' social settings. We focus on three aspects of settings that represent intervention targets: social processes (i.e., patterns of transactions between two or more people or groups of people), resources (i.e., human, economic, physical, temporal resources), and organization of resources (i.e., how resources are arranged and allocated). We postulate that these setting aspects are in dynamic transaction with each other, resulting in setting outcomes. Discussion focuses on the implications of our theoretical framework for setting intervention.