Identifying High-Impact Improvement Areas: Insights From a Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: Research-Practice Partnerships for Educational Transformation: Methodologies for Systemic Educational Transformation: Building Infrastructures for Educational Transformation Through Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Perspective and objectives
Research suggests that long-term mutualistic collaborations between researchers and practitioners around problems of practice hold promise for facilitating better informed evidence and data based decision-making processes at the district and school level (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Authors, 2014; Schildkamp, 2019). This study is part of a RPP called ‘Better Together’ including eleven K-12 schools in an urban fringe school district in California. The school district has a long history of supporting educational innovation initiatives (Grey et al., 2019). Emerging results on educational improvements through RPP are promising (Coburn & Penual, 2016; Cooper, MacGregor, & Shewchuk, 2020).

Within Better Together Better Together district leaders sought to better understand and rigorously examine key levers for transformational change. To that end, we developed a new method to help school leaders to identify which area, among the available alternatives, is associated with the largest growth in light of the mission, vision, and core values of the district, based on relationships in the data. This new method produces a data-based ranking of the areas in terms of their positive effects on all other areas. Of importance is that this approach can incorporate the practitioner’s idea on desirable growth, for example the preference to effectuate the highest possible growth in all areas, the preference to improve certain areas more than other, or the preference to improve weaker areas first.

Methods, data sources, and analysis
As part of the research-practice partnership, an annual survey has been organized for seven stakeholder groups including students, teachers, parents, staff, and school leaders about instruction, culture and climate, and social relationships. This survey data and most importantly the ‘high touch’ partnership with the district enabled the development and application of the new method that is based on Conditional Mean Independent (CMI) correlations and growth functions.

Preliminary results
The results of applying the CMI and growth functions methods to the survey data showed that students’ trust in their educators (principal and teacher trust) has the highest average association with all areas that together make up the student’s school experience. Parallel to the findings in the student survey data, the results show that principal trust has the highest overall association with areas that together make up the teacher’s daily experiences in their work. These are domains that school leaders did not consider to be high impact improvements initially.

Significance of the work
Research shows that the use of evidence is strongly related to the accessibility, availability, and applicability of research and evidence (Author et al., 2014; Author, 2014). RPPs bear the potential to increase ‘data agency’ in educational organizations, meaning that practitioners become more critical about and responsible for the role of theory and data in their decision-making. This is referred to as building data literacy – a common issue in research-practice partnerships (Earl & Katz, 2006; Wohlstetter, Datnow, & Park, 2008; Wu, 2009). The work described here contributes to this objective by presenting the new CMI and growth functions method.

Authors

• Nicolette van Halem, Erasmus Rotterdam University

• Alan J. Daly, University of California - San Diego

• Yi-Hwa Liou, National Taipei University of Education

• Marie Lockton, University of California - San Diego

• David Albert Rodes Trautman, University of California - San Diego

• David Vannasdall, Arcadia Unified School District