A Dean's Perspective

Abstract

A Dean's Perspective Robert C. Pianta (bio) I write this commentary from two perspectives: that of an academic researcher who for several decades has relied on partnerships with practitioners and agencies in the field, and that of a dean of a school of education. From both perspectives, it's clear that research-practice partnerships are essential if research in the social and educational sciences is to be both strong and relevant—that is, if research is to have impact. I come to this belief from experience in a wide array of research-practice partnerships, most of which, fortunately, have been constructive. Here I reflect on the benefits and challenges of these experiences and the types of support that higher education institutions must provide to sustain these essential components of research infrastructure and career development. Research-practice partnerships are also critical to a university's service mission and to advancing practice and professional education. Three themes frame my comments: that partnerships are strategically important for strong and relevant social science, that effective partnerships require explicit investment and development strategies, and that partnerships are developmental contexts for scholars. An Essential Tool The value of scholarship in social and educational science is most often described in terms of the metrics employed in academia—journal impact factors, citations, peer review. Although these factors clearly help determine the value or strength of research from the perspective of the scientific community, they don't fully indicate the value of scientific research for parents, community leaders, policy makers, and the public at large. At times, people outside academia criticize social and educational science research for not yielding results that can help them in their work and for the ways that scholars communicate their results. Thus it's not surprising that we're paying closer attention to increasing our research's relevance. Scholarship is relevant to the extent that it can answer questions that are important to interested people outside academia, can be understood and used by those people, or can influence the decisions and actions of practitioners and policy makers. Because partnerships across the research-practice boundary enable the exchange of experience, information, and perspectives among academics and stakeholders, they are an [End Page 151] indispensable resource for individual scholars and institutions under pressure to produce social science that is both strong and relevant. Stronger Science From the point of view of the traditional metrics of academia, effective partnerships with practitioners (either individuals or organizations) add value in a number of ways. First, partnerships provide insights into questions, processes, mechanisms, and variables of interest to investigators—insights we can't get without the information and perspectives of field partners. These insights and this information help scholars create more refined measurement tools, develop data collection plans and protocols that are more likely to capture the phenomena we want to study, and advance a much more informed and comprehensive interpretation of the results we obtain. Second, partnerships can help researchers take advantage of scale. For many research questions in the social sciences and particularly in education, sample size is a critical factor in designing and interpreting research. Many of our research questions involve malleable factors in education systems that fall into the framework of "what works for whom under what conditions." By their very nature, such questions require a sample that draws from populations larger and more diverse than, say, the set of local fourth-grade math classrooms. To make the science strong enough to yield interpretable results, it's essential to investigate processes and mechanisms across cultural, racial, economic, or other background characteristics of students or across assorted school or classroom features. The power of our statistical analyses, our ability to understand mediating and moderating processes, and our ability to follow a sample over time are all enhanced by increased scale. Scientific work that takes place at the level of school divisions (or districts, as they're called in many states), or that is representative of regions or populations of interest, is crucial to building knowledge that reflects reality. Research-practice partnerships that allow access to scale and to variation can thus strengthen a program of research and dramatically enhance the scientific value of a single study...