It discusses the nature and design principles of collaboratories as applied in the sciences, and the adaptation of that structure for use in organizing an educational improvement effort aiming to connect research and practice more productively. This paper considers the Research and Practice Collaboratory as an experiment in using the collaboratory structure in the education domain. Collaboratories as a Vehicle For Investing in the Improvement of Education: Reflections on the Illuminative Case of the Research+Practice Collaboratory The role of Inverness Research in the Collaboratory was to document and portray the key elements of design that enabled The Collaboratory to serve its mission of enabling research and practice to interact in multiple productive ways for STEM improvement.įor a summary of Collaboratory accomplishments, see below the paper abstracts. The Collaboratory - led by a team of CoPIs with responsibility for the local labs - also functioned as an over-arching structure that interacted with the labs and the field in a range of ways. The types of organizations varied and included universities, school districts, intermediary school reform organizations, and informal/out-of-school organizations. To develop this idea, the RPC supported “local labs” in three states - California, Maine, and Washington - each of which focused on an improvement project in STEM.Įach local lab operated as an autonomous research-practice partnership involving local organizations. In particular, the RPC’s work aimed to demonstrate that research and practice can function in better relationship with one another to better inform educational improvement. The Collaboratory was formed in response to the problem of the persistent gap between research and practice, a gap that inhibits positive changes in education. The five papers in this portfolio examine the design and functioning of the Collaboratory (RPC) from multiple vantage points. The Research + Practice Collaboratory ( ) was funded for five years by the National Science Foundation to bring research and practice together in effective ways to address core problems of STEM improvement. In this way, the evaluation draws on findings regarding views and experience both within and beyond the Collaboratory’s sphere of influence.Studies of Design and Function in Organizational Arrangements that Link Research and Practice in Education We also sought to place the Collaboratory in the broader education research-and-practice landscape by investigating the views, priorities, and needs of people involved in research-practice partnerships who had not participated in Collaboratory activities (including people who had not heard of it), as well of people who fund research-practice partnerships in education.
RESEARCH PRACTICE COLLABORATORY PROFESSIONAL
We also used interviews and surveys to gather the perspectives of people who partnered with the Collaboratory, participated in its events, and used its tools and resources, including professional association leaders, workshop participants, and website users. To examine the Collaboratory’s outcomes, we used digital metrics (e.g., Google Analytics) to gauge the project’s reach and the uptake of its products, and then benchmarked the results of this analysis against the same metrics from several other similar entities. We later refined these descriptions by checking them against findings from other analysis tasks. To examine the Research + Practice Collaboratory’s strategy, SRI interviewed project leadership and professional association contacts, conducted observations at events, and reviewed documents to develop descriptions of strategies, activities, and routines. Summative evaluation of the Research + Practice Collaboratory: Final report. Anderson, K., Podkul, T., Singleton, C., & D’Angelo, C.
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