Understanding Practitioners' Perspectives in Research-Practice Partnerships

• In Event: Advancing Research-Practice Partnerships: Leveraging the Positionality of Graduate Student Researchers

Abstract

Purpose:

This study examines attempts to understand how practitioners conceptualize their programs within a larger study evaluating these programs. Understanding practitioners’ perspectives is important in establishing a working theory of change to guide design-based research (Bevan & Penuel, 2017; Supovitz, 2013). Embedded in a larger study evaluating a school’s Career Academies, this study addresses the following questions: What do [and don’t] local practitioners see as the important components of their program? How did the unique position of a 1st-year graduate student influence the understanding of these perspectives?

Theoretical Framework:

The perspectives of practitioners influence the design, scope, and execution of research. Specifically, understanding how leaders “see the system that produces the current outcomes” (Bryk et al., 2015), will guide the study. As those conducting research are limited by their experience or knowledge, this must also be reflectively considered in affecting the research process.

Methods and Data Sources:

This research utilizes a case study approach to explore how practitioners engage in research and how a first-year graduate student attempts to elicit stakeholders perspectives (Yin, 2015). The constant comparison method (Yin, 2015), and triangulation of various sources were used to identify emergent themes that occurred in the data.

Tools like driver diagrams (Bryk et al., 2015), which aim to visualize the system producing outcomes, were used in this study. Observation notes from meetings, and research design, a driver diagram, and notes from designing the diagram are used as data.

Findings:

The study finds that practitioners were in consensus on the components leading to student success in their Career Academies, but also described variation within these components that casts doubt of the validity of claims. Working through these discrepancies requires tactful questioning and knowledge of when to consult outside perspectives, skills unlikely to be fully developed by graduate students.

The study also found a need for local and timely data of components of the Academies believed to produce change. These types of measures, often framed as “improvement measures,” are dynamic measures targeted at measuring drivers of a system (Bryk et al., 2015; Cobb et al., 2013). Graduate students’ abilities to construct “improvement measures” with partners and to consider how to collect and use these unique contextual data points will influence the research trajectory and should be considered.

Additional findings include perspectives involved in research planning can limit understanding of the system. This insight suggests researchers engaged in RPPs should assess the ability of the stakeholders to accurately construct a theory of change given available perspectives. Graduate students would benefit from mentorship and consultation on when and how to seek outside perspectives.

Significance:

Further research and efforts to describe improvement measures to practitioners and test their effectiveness and how practitioners understand their usefulness, would be warranted in the field of Research Practice Partnerships. Graduate students would likely benefit from practice and mentorship in questioning the assumptions, beliefs, and perceptions of the research team as they construct a theory of change during the research process.

Author

• Jacob Steiss, University of California - Irvine