Scholarly understanding, mediating artefacts and the social impact of research in the educational sciences

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the social impact of educational sciences. It introduces a framework for studying the social impact of research and uses it to analyze the social impact of the work of a research group studying learning difficulties at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The framework suggests that the social impact of research can be understood in terms of the context of impact. This context is composed of four interacting dimensions: epistemic, artefactual, social-institutional, and spatial-geographical dimensions. In addition, the paper suggests that the understanding of the phenomena to be studied and mediating artefacts based on this understanding play a key role in the expansion of the social impact in the educational sciences. The article provides a means of analyzing the narratives of longer-term impact of research and suggests that even in education—a classical area of advancing public good—the distribution of mediating artefacts is increasingly likely to be realized through markets.