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Efforts to align educational assessments with the sociocultural foundations of learning and with instruction are limited because we lack evidence of how such systems can be developed and maintained in inherently complex educational settings. Credible use cases are helpful to developing the evidence base, and we present one here: a research-practice partnership between a university and a large urban school district. The goals of our codesigned system include supporting the redistribution of educational opportunities in science classrooms (equity) and supporting and repairing students' self-perceptions as agents of knowing and reasoning in science classrooms and in the community (epistemic justice). We describe components of the partnership and educational practices that work together to accomplish these aims: curricula with embedded assessments allowing students to figure out rather than be told core ideas, exit tickets that elicit students' classroom experience, and an instructional guidance system focused on iterative refinement of teacher learning opportunities to support student agency.

AbstractMuch of the impact of a policy depends on how it is implemented, especially as mediated by organizations such as schools or hospitals. Here, we focus on how implementation of evidence‐based practices in human service organizations (e.g., schools, hospitals) is affected by intraorganizational network dynamics. In particular, we hypothesize intraorganizational behavioral divergence and network polarization are likely to occur when actors strongly identify with their organizations. Using agent‐based models, we find that when organizational identification is high, external change agents who attempt to direct organizations by introducing policy aligned messages (e.g., professional development emphasizing specific teaching practices) may unintentionally contribute to divergence in practice and polarization in networks, inhibiting full implementation of the desired practices as well as reducing organizational capacity to absorb new practices. Thus, the external change agent should consider the interaction between the type of message and the intraorganizational network dynamics driven by organizational identification.

Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed a number of innovative approaches to bridging the research-practice divide. A relatively new approach involves the formation of research-practice partnerships (RPPs), long-term collaborations aimed at educational improvement and transformation through engagement with research, intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work. Th is paper develops the idea that RPPs have the potential to create sustainable change, if they are able to support the mutual learning of partners to change practice while continuously adapting to turbulent environments of schools. As an illustration, the paper describes the evolution of an RPP in Colorado (U.S.A.) from a relatively small group of people representing a university and school district focused on a single line of research to an ongoing enterprise linking multiple researchers and educators to multiple lines of work to transform science teaching and learning in the district.

Accounts of how culture constitutes the learning activities we accomplish with others are flourishing. These accounts illustrate how participants draw upon, adapt, and contest historically situated social practices, tools, and relations to accomplish their learning goals [Vygotsky: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978]. Yet, they often lack attention to the ways that these social features reify and are reified by broader power structures and hierarchies. One way that power plays out in everyday social interaction is through the stories, narratives and ideologies that serve as resources for interpreting and organizing ongoing activity. Individuals become attuned to, coordinate and mobilize around these broader narratives through the <i>frames</i> they engage in moments of interaction. We offer frame analysis as a means of investigating both access <i>to</i> learning environments and opportunities to learn <i>within</i> them. To situate learning opportunities within and across different components of multilevel systems, a distinction is proposed between <i>framing within</i> a classroom or learning environment and <i>framing access to</i> educational processes and institutions. This paper recommends that researchers analyze, and design for, framing that disrupts predominant power structures and expands the possibilities for learning within more equitable social practices.

Recent scholarship suggests that research use is an interactive, social phenomenon, and that brokers play important roles in facilitating the exchange of research evidence. We add to this body of literature by exploring the role of brokers in the exchange of research evidence among state education agency leaders involved in K–12 science education policy implementation in the United States. We focus our study on the lead professional association for state science policymakers, the Council of State Science Supervisors (CSSS), because professional associations are the most prominent source of research for state and local education leaders, and are important for supporting the use of research evidence and policy implementation. Our findings, based on analysis of social network survey data, highlight the complex brokering roles CSSS members, and especially leaders in the association, played. These brokers not only enabled association members' access to diverse sources of research, but also facilitated between-state research exchanges. Our findings have implications for research and theory on brokering, and they point to the importance of professional associations for facilitating access to research to support education policy implementation.