As research-practice partnerships grow in number and reputation, the issue of evaluating them, measuring their effectiveness, and assessing their continuous health becomes increasingly important. However, with the many arrangements RPPs can take and the various outcomes and aims partnerships identify for themselves, it is not easy to arrive at a common way of addressing these questions. The pursuit of these formative or summative inquiries is complicated further by the variation in participating organizations with the RPP, where RPPs can have two or more research, practice, and/or community organizations involved.
One aim in particular that tends to cut across most RPPs is prioritizing the use of research evidence in practice. As such, assessing the impact RPPs have on local decision making may be a starting point for measuring RPP effectiveness, though this brings up new questions about how to precisely define and measure “impact” or “use of research”, and more broadly, what constitutes “research.”
Accordingly, the literature on assessing RPP effectiveness remains nascent. Yet, some thinking around these ideas has been developed and built upon. For a more detailed recap of major efforts around defining and assessing the effectiveness of RPPs, we recommend reading “What’s New With RPP Effectiveness?”, a 2021 NNERPP Extra article.
A Framework for Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships
The framework developed by Henrick, et al. (2017) “Assessing Research-Practice Partnerships: Five Dimensions of Effectiveness” represents a pivotal moment in the field’s quest to understand RPP effectiveness as it helped advance conversations from one-off, singular contributions on understanding how and when RPPs work to a field-informed contribution. The framework documented five dimensions or outcomes that seemed to be important for “effective” RPPs, no matter the type or structure of partnership.
Efforts building on the framework
The Henrick, et al. framework has since anchored many additional efforts, including applying the framework to a large sample of RPPs (in “A Descriptive Study of the IES Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships in Education Research Program”), individual RPPs working through the five dimensions of framework and examining how these dimensions apply to their own particular context (for example in “Research-Practice Partnership: Application to Implementation of Multitiered System of Supports in Early Childhood Education”), and producing new goals grounded in the framework to help assess RPP heath (for example, “Tool for Assessing the Health of Research-Practice Partnerships”). There are also several ongoing efforts to apply the Henrick, et al. framework to the evaluation of Computer Science for All RPPs, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) spurred in large part by NSF’s requirement of an evaluative component for its funded projects. The convener of this community of RPPs, RPPforCS, has developed a “Health Assessment ” tool based on the Henrick, et al. framework (see here for a reflection of five partnerships on their use of this tool).
In our own efforts to advance the field’s ability to measure the effectiveness of RPPs, NNERPP has partnered with the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP) to develop a set of research-based tools grounded in the Henrick, et al. framework, through a project funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. Using an evidence-centered design (ECD) approach, we created and published an updated RPP Effectiveness Framework, “Indicators of Research-Practice Partnership Health and Effectiveness: Updating the Five Dimensions Framework” by Erin Henrick, Caitlin C. Farrell, Corinne Singleton, Alison Fox Resnick, William R. Penuel, Paula Arce-Trigatti, Danny Schmidt, Stacey Sexton, Kristina Stamatis, and Sarah Wellberg. This updated framework revises the original 2017 framework developed by Henrick and colleagues. While the five dimensions of RPP effectiveness remain the same, the conceptualization of them is revised to reflect the evolving field and an explicit emphasis on the role of equity and power dynamics within RPPs. The toolkit is organized along these five dimensions. We are also creating a set of tools, including survey items and discussion protocols that all types of RPPs can use to get a sense of where they fall in terms of their individual RPP goals (to be shared soon).
Use of research evidence: A key outcome of many RPPs
One of the goals many of the research-practice partnerships in NNERPP and the field more broadly are working towards is to support the use of research evidence in practice. Given the reimagining of how research, practice, and community interact and work together via an RPP, there is great potential for RPPs to impact both the production and use of research evidence in practice.
Historically, the concept of “research use” has been characterized most commonly in a simple linear fashion: researchers produce research, practitioners get said research, read it, understand it, and use it to help them with their decision making. Based on our experiences, this could not be farther from reality. We have collected a number of resources that can shed more light on the complexity of research use in practice, for example “Research Worth Using: (Re)Framing Research Evidence Quality for Educational Policymaking and Practice” and “Democratizing the Development of Evidence”. We also recommend readers visit the William T. Grant Foundation’s website on supporting research use for a more expansive collection of resources on this topic, as well as the recently formed “Transforming Evidence Network.”
Key resources
As evidenced in the paragraphs above, the evaluation of RPPs is a complex task. To learn more, get started with these top five resources. You can browse a full list of resources in our RPP Knowledge Library.
Connection opportunities
Please see Events for potential learning and connection opportunities related to RPPs and evaluation.