Research and Policymaking in Education: An International Perspective

Abstract

Policy-oriented research in education covers a very short period indeed. Research deliberately and systematically geared to provide an extended knowledge base for reform and improvement in education initiated by public policymakers is hardly more than 25 years old. Over the last few years, I have had opportunity to ponder about this in conducting a study on how research and policymaking in education interrelate in Sweden, the Federal Republic of Germany, Britain, and (at the federal level) in the United States (Husen & Kogan, in press). Because I have been able to follow what has happened in educational research as well as to study its impact on educational policy in these four countries, the study has a comparative dimension. The comparisons have been made under two major aspects: (a) intrascientific or internal conditions, such as research paradigms, schools of thought, influential researchers, and (b) extrascientific or external conditions, such as availability of research funds and institutions, the market for research, the ideology of the state in terms of propensity for social intervention and the setting within which liaison between researchers and policymakers could be established.