How Educators Access and Evaluate Research in Education
 

This three year SSHRC funded study aims to map and evaluate the ways in which education research is shared with educators (teachers, principals, and other school leaders).

Project overview

This study will respond to the following questions:

• In what ways are research producers making their evidence available to educators?
• What is the impact of these efforts on the use of research by educators?

This study will involve panels of educators evaluating resources in terms of their accessibility, practicality and relevance, among other factors, for the purpose of helping researchers and research organizations develop more effective ways of sharing their work with educators.
 

Phase 1 of this research will identify the different knowledge mobilization strategies that research producing organizations (e.g., universities, research centres, governments, among other organizations.) are employing to connect educators with recent education research.

Phase 2 will examine these strategies from the perspective of educators to assess their value and relevance for practice. This phase assesses the value and actual or potential impact of these strategies on educators.  The research team will work with our partners to construct an evaluation tool for raters to use. This tool will lay out a set of criteria that practicing educators use to judge the value of various KM activities as identified in Phase 1. Working with our partner organizations, we will constitute panels of educators to do this work collaboratively – largely through on-line conversation. Depending on the specific KM activity being assessed, the panels could be organized by function (e.g. teachers, principals), by level (e.g. elementary, secondary), by subject (e.g. language, special education) or by geography.