The Imposition of Instrumental Research Use: How School and District Practitioners Enact Their State’s Evidence Requirements

Abstract

The Every Student Succeeds Act builds on prior efforts to bridge the gap between research and practice through the imposition of evidence requirements. This article presents findings from a small-scale micro-process study of three districts in one state during their first year of implementing those requirements. Informed by past conceptualizations of the research-practice gap and sociocultural theory, I look closely at how these practitioners made use of the state’s highly elaborated implementation tools for research-based decision-making. I argue that these micro-processes point to possible new dimensions of the research-practice gap—namely, practitioners’ understandings of the purposes of evidence, the degree of confidence evidence should provide, and the commensurability of different forms of evidence