AERA SIGRU Annual Meeting 2005
- Let's Tell the Teaching Quality Story: What Does it Mean? Dialogue Between Researchers and Communicators Session type: Interactive Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 13 - 10:35am - 12:05pm†Building/Room: Ritz-Carlton, Montreal / Vice Royal I
This interactive symposium dramatizes and probes a fundamental tension in the utilization of research. To be useful and to be used, research must be communicated in terms that the audience can--and wants to--understand, yet researchers often lack the expertise to frame discourse about research effectively for nonscholarly audiences, who are so often the intended users of research. People with expertise in communication do have these skills, but they often have a limited grasp of what the research really says. This session explores the ways that researchers and communicators of research--and, indeed, the two functions of producing and communicating research knowledge--resolve their differences, or at least manage the tension, in the context of policy research aimed at state policy audiences.
The session examines this matter, first, by plunging participants into an actual "message framing" discussion concerning the analysis of data from a survey of teaching conditions within a state. Second, audience members and symposium participants will be invited to suggest alternative ways of interpreting the data and communicating findings so that both the impact and integrity of the research is maximized. Third, stepping back from the particular instance at hand, all in the room will try to derive principles from the "case" at hand and other examples they may bring to the room.