Impact-Based Research: Cross-Sector Insights Toward Aligning Education Research and Real-World Impact (NSF EAGER GRANT)

As the world becomes increasingly complex, interconnected and changes at a pace unprecedented in history – every sector has been forced to continually adapt to meet their objectives, whether they are service focused (e.g. philanthropic and public interest sectors), commercial focused (e.g. business sectors) or a combination of both. Learning Sciences is no different. A key premise underlying the need for this proposal is that educational products and services need to be not only grounded in good learning sciences, but that they also need to be designed to be effectively implemented, sustained and continually optimized in an educational landscape that is undergoing dramatic changes. The sector will have to develop new and agile methodologies that can be continually tuned and optimized across differing and shifting contexts to drive toward meaningful, scalable learning outcomes. It is our responsibility as a community committed to connecting learning sciences work to real-world learning impact that we conduct our research (and that we prepare the upcoming generation of learning scientists to conduct their research) in a manner that is methodologically rigorous and results in theoretically useful claims and innovations that address society’s pressing educational challenges.

The goal of this initiative is to bring together pioneering government, academic, philanthropic and industry leaders to inform the development of an impact-based research methodology (IBR); a new approach to enabling a more direct and overt connection between academic research and the development of educational products and services that are making sustainable, scalable real-world impact. A key objective of IBR is to help close the gap between the great potential of educational research and the lack of research-based products and services that are making impact at scale in the fast-moving, constantly evolving formal and informal educational channels. Building on the intellectual merit and applied focus of design-based research (DBR) as well as best practices from the commercial software-as-service and impact-focused social entrepreneurship sectors, IBR is a service-oriented research approach that aligns key stakeholders around impact outcomes accomplished through clearly articulated theories of change that are continually optimized through sustained, capital efficient, real-world implementations and shared best practices across a committed community of practice. IBR will build on these cross-sector insights by developing a tighter connection between the research methodology and the continual optimization of impact outcomes.