Educational Research and Policymaking: An International Perspective

Abstract

This chapter highlights an international perspective of educational research and policymaking. Research in education orientated towards the making of policy covers a very short period indeed. Research deliberately and systematically intended to provide an extended basis of knowledge for the reform and improvement of education initiated by persons responsible for educational policy is hardly more than twenty-five years old. The relations between educational research and the making of educational policy are dependent both on the intra-scientific or internal conditions of the work of research and on extra-scientific or external conditions. The intra-scientific conditions are the prevailing modes of doing research, prevailing schools of thought, the qualities of influential theorists or research workers. The extra-scientific conditions are the availability of research funds and institutions, the market for research, and the outlook of the government as it is expressed in its propensity for social intervention. They include also the liaison between research workers and policymakers. In the development of the intellectual community of educational research and the disciplines that formed the basis for scholarly studies in education, there is a marked break between the period before and the period after the Second World War. In the extra-scientific conditions that affect educational research, mainly, the willingness of governments to support and utilize research in education, the dividing line should perhaps be drawn at least a decade later.