Research Use in District Decision Making: A Methodological Approach

• In Event: From Data and Evidence to Decisions for School and District Improvement: Synthesizing Findings and Extending Theory

Abstract

School district central offices sit at the nexus of the increasingly prominent demands for evidence use. They are asked to use research to decide how to participate in state and federal programs, how to manage their own organization, and what to require of and provide to schools and teachers. While there are a few published studies (e.g., Author, 2009; Finnegan, Daly, & Che, 2013), there is still much to learn about when and under what conditions district leaders use research about key issues facing the students in their care.

Part of the challenge is that studying research use is notoriously difficult. Self-report—either through interviews or surveys—tends to fall prey to social desirability bias and retrospective smoothing. These approaches may not be well suited to fully capture what we know is an interactive process, unfolding over time, across many settings, and with different configuration of actors (Kennedy, 1982; Weiss, 1998; Weiss & Bucuvalas, 1980). They are not well suited for untangling the issues of status, authority, power, and politics, which we know come into play when district leaders make decisions (Author, 2008; Johnson, 1999). We argue that observational work and new methods of analysis are needed to understand how research use is leveraged for different purposes and in different contexts.

We present an analytic approach to studying research use in district decision making, rooted in observational approaches, drawing from data from a study of decision making in the context of research-practice partnership meetings. Research-practice partnerships are long-term, mutualistic collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are intentionally organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving district outcomes (Author, 2013). Advocates argue that these partnerships are likely to produce research and innovations that are useful to practice because they are rooted in districts’ needs. District leaders, the argument goes, are more likely to use this research in their decision making.

To demonstrate our analytic approach, we present three episodes of deliberation within joint meetings of researchers and practitioners. Our approach highlights the role of framing in decision making, i.e., the intentional efforts of actors in social settings to persuade others to view problems in a certain light (diagnostic frames) and to pursue particular course of action to address those problems (prognostic frames) (Benford & Snow, 2000). We pay particular attention to the warrants that individuals make as they argue for a particular definition of the problem or solutions. We attend to when and how individuals invoke research, how the dynamics of authority and status shape what frames become influential in decision making, and the ways in which particular actors are implicated in frames (“yoking”).

This approach enables researchers to study research use as it unfolds, rather than retrospectively, providing insight into both the process of research use and the organizational conditions that shape it. We close by discussing implications of this approach for scholarly studies of research use at multiple levels of the system.

Authors

• Cynthia E. Coburn, Northwestern University

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Annie Allen, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Caitlin Farrell, University of California - Berkeley