Research-Practice Partnerships: Collaborative research for educational change

Overview

<p>The Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) Grants Program is intended to support education research projects that engage in collaborative and participatory partnerships with project budgets up to $400,000 and durations of up to three years.</p> <p>We view partnerships as an important approach to knowledge generation and the improvement of education, broadly construed. Rigorous partnership work is intentionally organized to engage diverse forms of expertise and perspectives, across practitioners as well as scholars and disciplines, in knowledge generation around pressing problems of practice. Further, RPPs can facilitate the long-term accumulation of knowledge in new ways as researchers and practitioners work together to ask practitioner-relevant questions on key topics in specific settings over time. Many key problems of practice are historically saturated and require multiple perspectives and long-term engagement if sustainable and systemic change is to occur. Over the long term, we anticipate that research conducted by RPPs will result in new insights into the processes, practices, and policies that improve education for learners, educators, schools, universities, families, and communities.</p> <p>Proposals to the Research-Practice Partnership program must be for research and other activities aimed to support collaborative partnerships between academic researcher(s) and a broad array of practitioner(s) of education.</p> <p>The following categories are meant to be illustrative, but not exclusive, of activities beyond the research that could be funded under this program:</p> <p><strong>Research activities</strong><br>Each proposal should describe new research that would be launched or existing research activities that would be expanded with the grant. Examples might include randomized trials of new curricula, participatory studies with learner and family co-researchers; design-based research focused on teacher classroom practice; needs mapping with community partners; or deep descriptive work focused on a range of learner outcomes.</p> <p><strong>Research Infrastructure</strong><br>Funds may be used for building and sustaining infrastructure needs for the research activities of the partnership. Examples may include the development of surveys, assessment tools, and other instruments; the development of co-design protocols; and the upkeep of data archives and matching systems.</p> <p><strong>Outreach, Communications, and Relationship Building</strong><br>Activities that strengthen the working relationship between partners and other stakeholders are also a possible component of the projects. Successful research-practice partnerships devote a great deal of attention to building and maintaining trust across stakeholder groups and within their partnership.</p> <p><strong>Capacity Development</strong><br>Many research-practice partnerships seek to assist the practice partner in developing capacity to use research evidence and data in their daily decision-making. Funds could be used to learn how to better engage others in research, conduct better practice-driven research, or to be better equipped to communicate complex research findings to practitioners, families, communities, or policy makers that were not primary partners.</p>