This paper analyses the importance of the knowledge dissemination in the process of research use in educational policy and practice.

In order to provide a comprehensive perspective, the paper reports results from a survey of Romanian education researchers regarding their experiences with research dissemination and transfer to policy makers and practitioners. In addition interviews with academic managers and policy-makers were conducted.

The survey is designed considering dissemination as an index composed of several dimensions, following an adaptation of the Research Utilisation scale (Knott & Wildavsky, 1980, and Cherney et al, 2012): importance of tailoring research; importance of meetings and dissemination; importance of presentations and reports; importance of using refereed publications; and importance of media. The survey was administered to a sample of 115 academics from 17 public universities in Romania, representing 31% of all academics in schools of education.

In addition 14 interviews with academic leaders and 13 interviews with policymakers have been conducted. The guide of interviews followed dimensions as: the role of university leaders in the institutional research dissemination, the mechanisms and structures universities possess in order to facilitate the research dissemination and the expectations users have in this process.

The results show that academics and policy-makers have different perspectives on the importance of tailoring research. Whereas academics consider readability and ease of comprehension of research results to be very important to end users, policy-makers report that the language researchers’ use continues to be very technical and difficult to translate into policy (Landry, Amara & Lamari, 2001). The study findings suggest that this barrier is also reinforced by the passive role that researchers play in presenting research results, as they are more comfortable sending reports to parliamentary committees rather than meeting and holding discussions with policy-makers.

References

Cherney, A., Povey, J., Head, B., Borehamb, P. & Ferguson, M. (2012). What influences the utilisation of educational research by policy-makers and practitioners? The perspectives of academic educational researchers. International Journal of Educational Research. 56: 23–34.

Ion, G. & Iucu, R. (2016). The impact of postgraduate studies on the teachers’ practiceEuropean Journal of Teacher Education. 39(5): Special issue: Mobilising research knowledge for teaching and teacher education. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2016.1253674

Knott, J., & Wildavsky, A. (1980). If Dissemination Is the Solution, What Is the Problem? Knowledge: creation, diffusion, utilization 1(4): 537-78.

Landry, R., Amara, N., & Lamari, M. (2001). Climbing the ladder of research  utilization–Evidence from social science research. Science Communication, 22(4): 396– 422.