Partnerships between researchers, policymakers and practitioners make ECEC better

Freya Lucas

May 04, 2021

Save

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs), long-term collaborations between researchers, policy makers and practitioners, represent an especially promising strategy for making sure that all children benefit from early childhood education, according to researchers from NYU Steinhardt and the University of Virginia have found.

The Future of Children journal, released last week by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, was edited by Daphna Bassok of the University of Virginia and Pamela Morris of New York University’s Steinhardt School, and argues that RPPs are crucial for solving today’s most pressing question in early childhood education—how to deliver high-quality prekindergarten programs at scale.

“Too often there is a disconnect between the questions researchers tackle and the ones that are more urgent and salient for policy makers or practitioners,” Ms Bassok said. “The findings from rigorous, well-designed research studies may not be particularly useful for addressing the real-life complexity that educators and policymakers face.”

“The idea of research practice partnerships is that through close collaborations, researchers can do work that really helps policy makers address the big problems they are tackling and do the work fast enough to actually inform change,” Ms Morris continued. “Our hope is that this journal makes that clear.”

RPPs are Designed to Improve Educational Outcomes

RPPs are defined by longevity, mutual decision-making and compromise, and the commitment of both parties to large-scale, systems-level problem solving, rather than a single project or research question.

In study after study, the authors note, early childhood education programs developed by researchers have shown large benefits, holding out the promise of substantially narrowing the achievement gap between disadvantaged children and their better-off peers.

When cities and states, however, establish large-scale prekindergarten programs, the results are often far more modest.

“The important questions today aren’t about whether early childhood education “works,” but about how to invest limited resources to improve the quality of large-scale prekindergarten programs, support the early childhood workforce, and reach the children who need the most help,” Ms Morris said.

“Delivering effective early childhood education at scale remains elusive,” Ms Bassok added.

“Findings from promising research studies rarely make their way into early childhood practice; at the same time, policy and practice decisions are often made without research evidence to guide them.”

That, she continued, is partly because policy makers and practitioners have different priorities and work on different timelines than researchers do.

Through collaboration, compromise, and long-term commitment, RPPs can help bridge the gap and produce research that’s relevant and useful to policy makers and practitioners, while at the same time offering scholars opportunities for broad and innovative research wouldn’t be possible in one-off studies of a single program or topic.

A “User Manual” for partnerships

Each article in the journal describes how a successful early childhood RPP confronted a major challenge or exploited an unexpected opportunity in the process of working together to create a research or funding agenda, develop measurement tools, take innovation to scale, navigate conflicting timelines, find a balance between academic rigor and feasibility, or build research capacity.

In this sense, the editors note, the journal offers “both a user manual and a road map for future partnerships to follow.”

The COVID-19 pandemic, Ms Morris argues, simply reinforces the validity of the collection and the benefits of an RPP.

For example, as COVID-19 spread in New York City, researchers in an established RPP there quickly assembled materials about remote learning, including a tool kit for teachers citywide, and offered resources to answer policy makers’ most urgent questions.

“The pandemic has created large gaps in the services provided to our youngest learners, and opened the door for new collaborations as policy systems race to meet children’s needs,” Ms Morris said. “In this context, RPPs can support efforts to rebuild and reimagine early childhood education systems that can help all of our nation’s children acquire strong foundations for kindergarten and beyond.”

To read Research-Practice Partnerships to Strengthen Early Education, as well as past issues of the Future of Children, please see here.

Don’t miss a thing

Keeping children safe with one simple lesson

Water safety remains at the forefront of national concern, as drowning continues to be the leading cause of accidental death for children aged 0-4.

Ecological identity: a new lens on an age-old practice

The journey to embed ecological identity is a personal one, as identity sits close to one’s heart and is shaped from our own foundational years. For myself, it was founded in warm summer afternoons playing in the rockpools along the beaches in Sydney, discovering the names of all the little creatures that lurked there, including the starfish that suctioned to my curious fingertips.

What Can Australia Learn from Ontario’s Child Care Ratios?

As workforce pressures continue to shape early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy discussions in Australia, international comparisons provide useful perspectives. Canada’s approach, particularly in Ontario, offers a case study in how educator-to-child ratios, maximum group sizes and qualification requirements can be legislated as an integrated framework.

Integrated school and early learning hubs linked to stronger transitions and family engagement

A new evaluation has found that integrating early learning, health and family support services within schools significantly improves access for families and strengthens outcomes for children, adding momentum to calls for expansion of integrated hubs across Victoria.

AERO reports growing uptake of evidence-based practice across schools and ECEC

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) has reported increasing adoption of its evidence-based guidance across Australian schools and early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, signalling a strengthening national focus on research-informed practice.