Background/Context: The reckoning with racial injustice and growing inequality that have become hallmarks of the early 2020s in the United States has implications for impact analysis and the evidence it produced for public policy decision-making. Various researchers have highlighted the shortcomings that impact analyses have when estimating the…

In this paper, the authors examine the complex relationship between education research and policymaking, analyzing key barriers and potential solutions for increasing research impact on policy. Four main challenges are identified: differing cultures and incentives between researchers and policymakers, communication barriers, competing values in…

A randomized experiment that measures the impact of a social policy in a sample of the population reveals whether the policy will work on average with universal application. An experiment that includes only the subset of the population that volunteers for the intervention generates narrower "proof-of-concept" evidence of whether the…

Different from more traditional policy-making avenues, the courts provide an antipolitical arena that does not require broad agreement from various constituents for policy enactment. Seeking to guide court decisions on these policy issues, individuals and organizations have filed "amicus" briefs that increasingly include social science…

Effective knowledge translation processes are critical for the development of evidence-based public health policy and practice. This paper reports on the design and implementation of an innovative approach to knowledge translation within a mixed methods study on lay involvement in public health programme delivery. The study design drew on…

Education planning provides the policy maker and the decision maker a logical framework in which to develop and implement education policy. At the international level, education planning is often confounded by both internal and external complexities, making the development of education policy difficult. This research presents a discrete event…

Objective: This study examined the extent to which US campuses identified as "100% tobacco-free" by the American Lung Association of Oregon adhered to the American College Health Association's the most recent guidelines and recommendations promoting tobacco-free environments in colleges and universities. Participants: A key informant from 162 of…

Effective policymaking requires understanding the causal effects of competing proposals. Relevant causal quantities include proposals' expected effect on different groups of recipients, the impact of policies over time, the potential trade-offs between competing objectives, and, ultimately, the optimal policy. This dissertation studies causal…

This study reports on the development and evaluation of a rating tool to assess the scientific utility and cultural appropriateness of community-level indicators for application with Indigenous populations. Indicator criteria proposed by the U.S. Institute of Medicine were culturally adapted through reviewing the literature and consultations with…

Background/Context: Determining the effectiveness of reform strategies is a major part of the current and future educational research agenda. Effects of education reforms will be evaluated largely quantitatively, and an important aspect of this work will be judging how well reform strategies work. The rhetoric of contemporary school reform…

Discussion of the Internet as a source of information focuses on the question of whether the Internet provides a representative subset of the known body of knowledge and information. Highlights include the knowledge comparison function; and the significance of information equivalence as a basis for setting goals for Internet research policy. (LRW)

Institutions, individuals, policies, and interactions are identified as the four research perspectives that have guided most legislative studies and that could help to identify promising areas for future investigation of education issues. The discussion of each perspective includes a review of landmark research and comments on its contributions…

Longitudinal research demonstrates that: (1) initial consensual goals are formalized incrementally over time; (2) directions of these changes are influenced by constituencies participating in policy formation as well as broader social movements; and (3) evidence for longitudinal implementation studies needs to be garnered from a confluence of…

Examination of the relationship between environmentalists and scientists concludes that environmentalism has had little impact on science. Topics discussed include the degree to which scientific research has become more applied; efforts to integrate and coordinate research projects; the synthesis of scientific information for policy purposes; and…

Among the purposes of this chapter is the provision of a description of the sample and research design of the MISOE sample data systems, including a specification of the size of the sample. (Author/RK)