.edu When I started my job as research director of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education twelve years ago, I thought my job was to figure out what worked. My agency was just beginning to have access to new and exciting longitudinal data on students and educators. I envisioned that I’d use those data along with strong designs for causal inference to determine which programs and policies were working and which were not. Once we knew those answers, I figured, we would get better policy that would improve outcomes for Massachusetts’ students. But in my twelve years in this job, I’ve learned that the process of improving policy1 through research is much subtler and more complex than I had initially imagined. Research influences policy more often than much of the academic community thinks, and more frequently every day as we learn how to do this work better. But its influence is less linear than researchers expect, and it is driven as much by relationships and organizational capacity as by the actual information studies produce. Research use operates through conversations, not code; structures in organizations, not standard errors; relationships, not randomized controlled trials. I worry that the growing national efforts to connect research and policy too frequently start from the same “find what works” frame of mind that I did twelve years ago. The “find what works” approach misunderstands the problem of research use as one of lack of information—either lack of information about the impact of a policy or lack of awareness by the policy maker about the available information—and a need for “translation” across sectors (Penuel et al. 2015). This belies the research literature about how research actually plays into the policy decision process. If

中文翻译：

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在我们实际生活的世界中最大限度地利用研究：关系，组织和解释

.edu十二年前，当我开始担任马萨诸塞州基础和中学教育系的研究主任时，我认为我的工作是弄清楚什么可行。我的代理机构才刚刚开始获得有关学生和教育者的令人兴奋的新纵向数据。我设想，我将使用这些数据以及强大的设计进行因果推论，以确定哪些程序和策略有效，哪些无效。我认为，一旦知道了这些答案，我们就会得到更好的政策，从而改善马萨诸塞州学生的学习成绩。但是在我从事这项工作的十二年中，我了解到，通过研究来改进政策1的过程比我最初的想象更加微妙和复杂。研究对政策的影响要比学术界认为的更多，并且每天都越来越频繁，因为我们学习了如何更好地完成这项工作。但是它的影响没有研究人员预期的线性，它受关系和组织能力的驱动与实际信息研究产生的驱动力一样大。研究使用是通过对话而非代码进行的；组织中的结构，而不是标准错误；关系，而不是随机对照试验。我担心国家越来越频繁地将研究与政策联系起来的努力，是从我十二年前所做的“发现有效的”思想框架开始的。“找到有效的方法”误解了研究使用的问题，因为缺乏信息（要么缺少有关政策影响的信息，要么决策者对可用信息缺乏了解）以及需要“翻译”跨部门（Penuel et al。2015）。这掩盖了有关研究实际上如何参与政策决策过程的研究文献。如果