Knowledge Mobilization in the Production of Education Research: A Mixed Methods Study

Calls to improve relationships between research and practice abound, among them efforts to help researchers to work in partnership with and communicate more effectively with policy and practice audiences, informing those that govern and design educational policies and those charged with implementation in schools and classrooms, respectively. These calls range from advocacy for participatory models of research to revisions to academic incentives that presently prioritize contributions to literature above impact on policy or practice. Most recently, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report, "The Future of Education Research at the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education" (2022), emphasizes that the largest federal funder of education research should include knowledge mobilization among its core areas of work. The end goal of these efforts is to have a more impactful research enterprise, one that both meets the needs of and is taken up in decisions made by policymakers and practitioners. The Center for Research Use in Education (CRUE) seeks to better understand how to strengthen the relationships between research and practice to the same ends--increasing the impact of research by better meeting the needs of policy and practice and by producing work that is useful and used in decision-making. CRUE has approached this work with attention to bidirectionality--focusing on both decision-processes in the practice space and the role of research in them (Farley-Ripple et al., 2022a, 2022b), as well as research production and the strategies used to increase its impact (Van Horn et al, 2023). In this paper the authors describe the work on the latter, presenting results of a mixed methods inquiry into the knowledge mobilization practices of researchers.