Over the last few years, interest in using research to support good policy and practice has grown significantly. The appetite for reliable and practical research findings has never been higher as most educators and many governments now see research playing a vital role in their work. Accumulated findings of research now offer substantive guidance to educators and education policy makers. Consider a few examples: * John Hattie's ratings of the effect of various education interventions based on more than 800 research meta-analyses (2008). * A series of books by the National Academy of Education reporting research findings on a range of issues, such as student engagement, mathematics, and science. www7.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/Featured_Education_Reports.html * The report on teaching reading produced by the National Academy of Education (Snow, Griffin, & Burns, 2005). * A series of reviews of research on professional development, leadership, social studies, and other areas produced by the New Zealand Ministry of Education's Best Evidence Synthesis. www.educationcounts.govt.nz/topics/BES These are all examples of excellent reviews of research that offer much practical guidance to educators; many others could also be cited. But, having the research available doesn't mean that the evidence will be used in policy or in practice. Knowledge is only one aspect of changing people's behavior, and, as we've learned from recommendations about regular exercise or healthy eating, knowing that we should do something doesn't mean that we'll do it! How to get educators to use more of the important findings from research is too complex to address in a single column. But an important part of the answer lies in the work of universities, since virtually everywhere in the world universities are the main producers of education research. Across the world, universities are struggling with how to share their re-search more effectively with schools and school systems. In June2011, leaders of faculties of education in 10 countries met in Toronto to discuss this question, under the auspices of the International Alliance of Leading Educational Institutions (www.intlalliance.org/). Each year, the deans of these 10 institutions choose a theme for their common work; the 2011 theme was mobilizing research knowledge in The 10 countries--Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States--vary enormously in size, number of universities and researchers, resources devoted to education, role of universities, and political and cultural attitudes toward education and research. A synthesis of the 10 background papers highlighted several important issues. Universities continue to focus much more on conducting research than sharing results. The resources, organization, and institutional support for the former are much greater than for the latter. Often there is little or no organized effort to mobilize research knowledge, with this work left to the initiative of individual researchers. Many universities have supports in place to support the exploitation of research in science, medicine, or engineering (such as spin-off companies and copyright lawyers) but they don't do the same for education research. A significant number of researchers worry that emphasizing practical implications of research could limit the kind of research that may be done, for example, avoiding research that criticizes existing policy. Countries differ in how they link research enterprises to policy and practice. In Korea and China, for example, there are very close links between senior researchers, university leaders, and senior policy officials in education. In other countries, including the United States or England or Canada, these links, if they exist at all, are by happenstance. In most countries, education research is very modestly funded. …