Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness

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Title: Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness
Abstract/Description: Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) have emerged as a promising strategy for bridging the current gulf between research and practice by bringing together experts from both fields to address problems facing K-12 U.S. education. Education RPPs provide the organizational structure to facilitate sustained collaboration between researchers and practitioners to improve learning opportunities for students. However, there is limited literature about how to assess the effectiveness of these organizations. This white paper describes a framework that comprises five dimensions for assessing education RPPs. This framework includes a set of indicators for each dimension that describes where to look for evidence that an RPP is making progress on a particular dimension of effectiveness. The indicators are intended to guide the development of more specific protocols and measures that could contribute to a body of evidence related to partnership effectiveness. This framework can help RPP teams develop assessment plans that will enable them to monitor and improve their work on an ongoing basis. The authors begin by describing how they developed the dimensions and in doing so distinguish between three types of RPPs. They then describe the framework, which comprises five broad dimensions of effectiveness that represent objectives shared across the three types of RPPs. For each dimension, they articulate "indicators of progress" that partnerships might use to assess their progress in accomplishing each objective. They conclude by discussing how the framework might be used and then consider next steps for work in this area.
Author/creator: Henrick, Erin C.; Cobb, Paul; Penuel, William R.; Jackson, Kara; Clark, Tiffany
Date: October 2017
Publisher: William T. Grant Foundation
Resource type: Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form: en Published Text
Scholarship genre: en Theoretical; en Methodological
IRE Approach/Concept: Research Practice Partnership (RPP); Research Alliance (RA); Design Research Partnership (DRP); Networked Improvement Community (NIC); Assessment
Featured case/project: Middle-school Mathematics and the Institutional Setting of Teaching (MIST) Project; National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP)
Language: en
URL: Official Report Webpage (via ERIC); Open Access PDF (via ERIC)
Citation: Henrick, E. C., Cobb, P., Penuel, W. R., Jackson, K., & Clark, T. (2017). Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness. William T Grant Foundation. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED610463