LIFE Center’s ECO: Research and Education Partnerships
A summary from LIFE Partner and LIFE ECO Lead Partner: SRI International
If we want to find ways to achieve greater utilization of…research, merely thinking about utilization cannot take us very far (Beyer & Trice, 1982)
SRI’s Team considers the activities at the base of the LIFE pyramid–educational collaborations, partnerships, capacity building–as elements of the complexity of work leading to LIFE Center-wide impact. It does so by conducting research on activities that contribute to the larger aims of the LIFE Center. The Team’s current work is represented by two research examples: (a) the study of a successful research partnership to understand the reasons for its success and (b) the cross-study of the implementation of new designs for learning in the work of three Social Learning Drivers, to look at the translation of basic research into practice across projects in the Center. The Social Learning Drivers we are addressing include Guiding and Collaborating, Choosing and Valuing, and Simply Believing a Virtual Interaction is Social .
Current areas of focus include studies of partnerships and the translation of research into practice.
Partnerships and LIFE: Partnerships are essential to the work of LIFE, as they extend our collective research expertise, help test our ideas in the field, and help support larger research efforts at dissemination and adaptation. In its first six years, LIFE researchers have partnered with institutions of higher education, national professional organizations, state departments of education, school districts and schools, museums, public media producers, and companies producing new designs to improve learning.
Partnerships with minority-serving institutions in particular contribute to capacity building in the learning sciences. To understand what makes a partnership successful, we examined the long-lasting LIFE partnership with the University of Texas in San Antonio, which involves a Research University 1 and a Hispanic-serving institution engaged in an interdisciplinary collaboration. Early findings suggest that one of the conditions for partnerships to work well for capacity building when collaborators have spent iterating the process of defining and aligning their goals together.
Translation of Research into Practice aims to apply theories of organizational learning and innovation to analyze the impact of different designs on practice, help correlate the lessons learned from each implementation, and study the impact of implementation on re-design and hypothesis generation.
This work makes visible several other types of work that are important for crossing the multiple boundaries between research and practice. When the focus is on researchers’ aims and designs, classroom research is focal; teachers’ actions that either follow or subvert the aims of designers are the primary objects of study. By contrast, when the focus is the classrooms when a new design is enacted, researchers and educators along with teachers and administrators have negotiated goals for their work, agreed on a division of labor, and organized around a set of artifacts whose meanings they have negotiated. Additional arenas come into focus, such as the “backstage” work to establish trust and plan for implementation. When we consider future trajectories for the joint work, how the current work furthers both shared and separate institutions’ goals similarly comes into focus.
A key study in our program on translating research into practice is the implementation of Teachable Agents in a suburban school district in Northern California. This study entails an arc of work that began in the lab, expanded into school settings, and then returns to the lab, allowing researchers to make new discoveries and form new hypotheses as a consequence of their engagement with settings of practice. The Teachable Agents study looked at different dimensions of student engagement both in and out of school, and helps contribute to understanding how students view the formal and informal environments differently.
