Suchergebnisse

Research‐practice partnerships (RPPs) have drawn a great deal of attention as promising structures for bringing educational research and practice closer together. However, promising as RPPs may be, challenges still exist and there have been calls for studies investigating how research can be used within RPPs, and how to include practitioners more in the generation of research evidence. We address these calls by conducting a systematic review of the research literature on RPPs. Our review of 57 articles shows that research is used in various ways to inform both the methods and content for facilitating school improvement in RPPs. For instance, research on effective PD can be directly applied to a Professional Development (PD) programme to inform the methods of the intervention, or research findings can be used as the content of an intervention to facilitate teacher learning. Moreover, the results suggest that the type of research used to inform RPPs affects the kinds of opportunities for research use that are presented to practitioners; ranging from applying research directly to practice (instrumental use), to using research to extend understanding (conceptual use), or using research methods and methodologies in order to increase practitioners' capacity for improving education (process use). Based on the results, we argue that the presented opportunities for research use in interventions strongly affect teachers' opportunities to participate in the generation of research evidence and thereby achieve a more democratised evidence system.

There is an increasing movement in education towards closer collaboration between researchers and practitioners and research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are seen as one promising approach. However, some challenges still exist. To work in a new collaborative context such as RPPs, researchers and practitioners must adjust their roles in relation to each other. To better inform this movement, we conducted a systematic literature review of 80 articles investigating what roles researchers and practitioners are described to assume in RPPs. The results demonstrate eight different roles for researchers and practitioners, respectively, which reflect variations in both the main processes and tasks for school improvement in RPPs, as well as how these tasks are divided between the participants. Further, based on how tasks are distributed, the different roles provide varying opportunities to pursue a democratisation of evidence.