Purpose: This article examines the state of progress of evidence-based educational policies in Europe and identifies organizations for the generation and dissemination of evidence. Further, it discusses some of the most relevant challenges facing the development of evidence-informed education policies in Europe. Design/Approach/Methods: This…

This study investigated policymaker dependence on evidence in education decision making in Oyo State Ministry of Education. The study was conducted under a descriptive survey design, 44 out of the 290 policymakers of the Ministry and Board of Education across the State were purposively selected for the study. Descriptive statistics of frequency…

The field of education is progressively building capacity and tools for producing rigorous research evidence to use in improving educational practice and outcomes. The knowledge base is lacking, however, in explicating the dynamics of research-based decision making and exploring connections between the work of research-practice partnerships and…

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other…

Currently, when there is a lot of political talk about the need for "evidence-based policy", and when public policy seeks to calibrate research quality and impact, there is a pressing need to reconsider the relationships between education/al research and education policy. This article seeks to do this, beginning with considerations of the…

Despite a political climate demanding evidence-informed decision making in education both within individual countries and at the international level, empirically grounded European research in this field is scarce. This paper reports on a European Commission-funded study that sought to identify and analyze different initiatives across Europe aimed…

This case study examined a multi-college community college district in northern California in a primarily rural area, to understand how their practices compared to management best practices designed to improve student success, barriers that may exist in implementing best practices, and how the institution may improve its own practices. The problem…

Various educational practices resulting from research recommendations and the associated problems are described. The author suggests that educational research can create a more reliable foundation for policy decisions concerning the introduction of reforms, by evaluating their resulting effectiveness. Investigators should suggest more pertinent…

M. Wang, G. Haertel, and H. Walberg have produced a summary of the bivariate relationships that influence learning. The problem is how to convert such evidence into knowledge, and the knowledge into policy. Discusses how health science provides a guide for making the conversion from evidence to policy. (SLD)

The six chapters of this special issue focus on how and why educational research is, or is not, used by its intended audiences of policymakers, practitioners, and other educational researchers. Texts that accept the more traditional notions of research knowledge precede the more radical visions in this collection. (SLD)

This special serial issue is based on the proceedings of an invitational conference on "Next Steps in Inner-City Education" held in Racine (Wisconsin) in October 1995. The three articles in this publication attempt to offer effective and practical recommendations for educational practitioners and policy makers who seek to transform the country's…

A study conducted in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the U.S.S.R. reports how these countries functioned in bridging the traditional gap between the development of theoretical research in education and the achievement of the desired reforms in school policies and practices. The choice of communist dictatorships as study subjects was based…

Experiences of the author support the contention that professors and practitioners in education face common dilemmas, and share the practice of teaching, but are not bound by any professional community. Professional communities based on commonalities in teaching can be constructed for those in higher education and the public schools. (SLD)

This document contains the speaking notes, spoken comments, and prepared papers of the participants in a 1997 symposium on utilization of vocational education and training (VET) research in VET decision making in Australia. The document begins with the "Introduction" (Chris Selby Smith). The next six sections contain the speaking notes…

The impact of research and development (R&D) on decision making and managers in vocational education and training (VET) was examined through a review of recent Australian studies in VET and health care. The framework adopted to analyze the relationships between R&D and decision making distinguished between the decision-making domain, the…