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RESEARCH AS PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE: AN UNEASY RELATIONSHIP

The need for disseminators to understand the subjective truth of the user is explicitly applied to
career and technical education (Frantz, 1991). There is no shortage of researchers who lament their
lack of influence over policy makers. Schultz (1989) argues that one consequence of the changing
assumptions about knowledge is that CTE policy makers rely even less on research than they did
previously. Moreover, Rosenbaum’s (1996) analysis of school-to-work programs in the United
States finds that policy makers ignore fundamental research-based results. An analysis of the
recent TAFE (Technical and Further Education) policies in New Zealand suggests that public
opinions determined policy, which were then resistant to empirical evidence (Ryan, 1999). In other
words, in spite of the relatively close relationship between career and technical education and
employment policies in most countries, policy makers are apparently not seeking out the work of
noted scholars to influence their decisions.

The use of social science research in policy-making is a subset of the broader problem of
dissemination knowledge utilization—a field of study that has a 60-year history; several dedicated
scholarly journals; and an increasing emphasis on the effects of knowledge on policy and practice.
While the early work in education focused on questions such as how and why kindergartens spread
through a decentralized system (Mort, 1963), the issue of how educational research relates to state
and federal policy has been addressed since the early-1970s (see, for example, Rist, 1970). In
general, scholars who wrote about the topic tended to view the problem through an engineering
lens, which reflected concerns about the limited inclusion of research-based knowledge in the
design of key educational policies. The engineering lens creates a battlefield in which competing
understandings of knowledge clash. The key components of these tensions mirror the concerns of
constructivist perspectives on knowledge use discussed above.

Educational research is more applicable, according to most current theories
of knowledge use, when it
1. Is compatible with existing belief structures,
2. Diffuses rapidly throughout the organization’s field so that it
becomes legitimized,
3. Has prima facie utility in local sites, and
4. Is processed or discussed within the potential user group in ways
that make it fit with local preferences.

One problem with this model is that as widely diffused knowledge becomes legitimated and
shared within the field of policy makers, sites, or other members of the culture, divergent voices
tend to be crowded out. This “silence,” rather than overt bias, may account for the absence of
minority scholar voices in CTE policy discussions (see Way & Rossmann, 1994).

But convergence does not always take place, and the contested nature of knowledge is a key
component of Weiss and Bucuvalas’s (1980) well-known political theory of knowledge use.
Where research-based knowledge remains contested, it can be used in many ways, depending on
the degree to which it is solid (e.g., can we trust this research?) and usable (e.g., can this be
applied here?).

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Turnbull, B. (1994). Regional educational laboratories: Some key accomplishments and
limitations in the program’s work. Washington, DC: Policy Analysis.

Vickers, M. (1994). Cross-national exchange, the OECD and Australian education policy.
Knowledge and Policy, 7, 24-47.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Way, W. L., & Rossmann, M. (1994). The interrelation of work and family: A missing piece of
the vocational education research agenda. Journal of Vocational Education Research, 19,
1-24.

Weiss, C., & Bucuvalas, M. (1980). Social science research and decision making. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Weiss, C. H. (1980). Knowledge creep and decision accretion. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion,
Utilization, 1, 381-404.

Weiss, C. H. (1982). Policy research in the context of diffuse decision making. Journal of Higher
Education, 53, 619-639.

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funded dissemination efforts have declined dramatically since the 1980s, there is little reason to
expect that his observation is outdated.

Smink sets out a proposal for dissemination—

“What should be developed and disseminated?

Who is the target audience?

Why is the dissemination activity needed?

How should the dissemination activity be designed?
When and where should dissemination activities occur?”

Many of these issues will be treated below, along with others that have emerged as
significant since the mid-1980s.

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¢ Need for authoritative support: An overlooked, but important, stimulus for knowledge
use is to justify decisions. Many decision opportunities create unanticipated controversy,
and decisionmakers need to bolster their preferred solutions with research. This
motivation is more likely than the above situations to provoke a thorough search of
research knowledge.

Field reports suggest that most (clearly not all) secondary schools tend to be bureaucratic,
politicized, and isolated from the most up-to-date information about educational innovations that
may improve educational opportunities—particularly for disadvantaged children. This isolation, in
turn, makes them less able to adopt and implement innovations (Natriello, Pallas, & McDill, 1990).
Here we focus not on the characteristics of schools serving a large majority of career- and
technically-oriented students that may make them less effective for children (see Cibulka, 1992),
but only on those that may affect their ability to become effective knowledge users.

Socioeconomic Conditions and Dissemination or Knowledge Use

The socioeconomic status (SES) characteristics of communities have significant implications
for issues of knowledge use and reform. In a study of a federally funded Research and
Development Utilization Program, Louis, Rosenblum, and Molitor (1981) found that the larger the
proportion of disadvantaged students in a school, the less effective were the school’s capacities to
engage in an effective problem-solving process. Wealthy communities have a richness of
intellectual and social capital that supports education, while less wealthy communities frequently
lack such resources. Pallas, Natriello, and McDill (1989) observe that schools are not the sole
educators of children, and that communities, as well as families, vary in terms of the educational
experiences they provide to supplement what is learned more formally. This assumption is
corroborated by research in Scotland, which shows that children in low-income communities
perform less well than similarly disadvantaged peers who live in higher SES communities, even
when the SES composition of the school is controlled for (Garner & Raudenbush, 1991).

The consequence of the SES factor for CTE cannot be ignored by anyone in the field who is
interested in the improvement of opportunities for all students. The majority of students who could
be beneficially affected by the implementation of the best research are located in lower income
communities—the very communities that often fail to serve their students well through innovation.
There is little research in CTE that looks at the socioeconomic divide in educational resources. Yet
the man on the street in virtually any country can describe the inequity of “who gets what.”

The context of schooling also raises another important factor that was previously discussed—
incentives for use. Clearly, in today’s policy environment, most schools have a strong incentive to
meet (or exceed) the state standards for school performance. Public humiliation or praise or, in
many states, the potential exodus of students from schools that do poorly on state examinations,
cannot be ignored. While specialized CTE schools often do well on such rating schemes,
comprehensive high schools with weak results may think that a de-emphasis of CTE programs is a
quick fix. This strategy ignores, unfortunately, the long-term solution of integrating academic and
vocational subjects that is typically advocated by scholars in CTE. The accumulating evidence
shows that this strategy may be very solid. The disjuncture between research and practice is
probably nowhere more evident than in this area.

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Project Title:

Grant Number:

Grantees:

Directors:

Percent of Total Grant
Financed by Federal Money:

Dollar Amount of Federal Funds
for Grant:

Act under which
Funds Administered:

Source of Grant:

Disclaimer:

Discrimination:

Funding Information

National Dissemination Center for
Career and Technical Education

0514990004

The Ohio State University
National Dissemination Center for
Career and Technical Education
1900 Kenny Road

Columbus, Ohio 43210

Floyd L. McKinney

100%

National Research Center for
Career and Technical Education

VO51A990006

University of Minnesota
National Research Center for
Career and Technical Education
1954 Buford Avenue

St. Paul, Minnesota 55108

Charles R. Hopkins

100%

$2,237,615 $2,237,615

Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998
P.L. 105-332

Office of Vocational and Adult Education
U.S. Department of Education
Washington, D.C. 20202

The work reported herein was supported under the National Dissemination for Career
and Technical Education, PR/Award (No. VO51A990004) and/or under the National
Research Center for Career and Technical Education, PR/Award (No. VO51A990006),
as administered by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S. Department of
Education.

However, the contents do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the
Office of Vocational and Adult Education or the U.S. Department of Education, and
you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states: “No person in the United States shall,
on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be
denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity
receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title 1X of the Education Amendments of 1972
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from
participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any
education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Therefore, the
National Dissemination Center for Career and Technical Education and the National
Research Center for Career and Technical Education project, like every program or
activity receiving financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Education, must be
operated in compliance with these laws.

ii

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Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981). The manufacture of knowledge. New York: Pergamon.

Lindblom, C., & Cohen, D. K. (1979). Usable knowledge: Social science and social problem
solving. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Little, J. W. (1995a). Contested ground: The basis of teacher leadership in two restructuring high
schools. Elementary School Journal, 96, 47-63.

Little, J. W. (1995b). What teachers learn in high school: Professional development and the
redesign of vocational education. Education and Urban Society, 27, 274-293.

Louis, K. (1982). Dissemination systems: Some lessons from past programs. In M. Butler & W.
Paisley (Eds.), Knowledge utilization systems in education (pp. 65-89). Beverly Hills,
CA: Sage.

Louis, K. (1994). Beyond managed change: Rethinking how schools improve. School
Effectiveness and School Improvement, 5, 1-22.

Louis, K., & Dentler, R. (1988). Knowledge use and school improvement. Curriculum Inquiry,
18, 33-62.

Louis, K., & Kell, D. (1981). The human factor in knowledge use: Field agent roles in their
organizational context. Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.

Louis, K., Kruse, S., & Raywid, M. (1996). Putting teachers at the center of reform. NASSP
Bulletin, 80, 9-22.

Louis, K., & Miles, M. (1990). Improving the urban high school: What works and why. New
York: Teachers College Press.

Louis, K., & Perlman, R. J. (1985). Commissions and the use of social science research: The
case of safe schools. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 7, 33-62.

Louis, K., Rosenblum, S., & Molitor, J. (1981). Strategies for knowledge use and school
improvement. Washington, DC: National Institute of Education.

Louis, K. S., & van Velzen, B. (1988). Reconsidering the theory and practice of dissemination.
In R. van den Berg & U. Hameyer (Eds.), Dissemination reconsidered: The demands of
implementation (pp. 261-281). Leuven, Belgium: Acco.

Macdonald, S. (1995). Learning to change: An information perspective on learning in the
organization. Organization Science, 6, 557-568.

March, J., & Olsen, J. (1974). Ambiguity and choice in organizations. Oslo, Norway:
Universitetsforlaget.

Miles, M. (1978). Linkage in a new key: The DTA experiment. Chicago: Center for New Schools.

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ALTERNATIVE VIEWS OF THE INTERSECTION OF RESEARCH AND POLICY

The politics of research use can be conceptualized as both intentional (explicit use of
knowledge as power, or approaches to knowledge creation as a political tool) and inadvertent
(the absence of voices, the use of traditional methods and samples, etc.). Not surprisingly, given
the typical attention in the politics of education to both the manifest and latent functions of
political events, many authors cover both. However, the emphasis of most contributions lies
primarily in one of these categories.

Another dimension of analysis underlies the differences among scholars who look at
knowledge use. Some focus primarily on the politics of production or the institutional
constraints, individual assumptions, and cultural norms that help to determine what is
investigated, how it is investigated, and how the results are presented. Other authors place more
emphasis on the politics of use, or the post-production politics, which focus on how research that
is already available comes into play in the policy-making process.

Intentional politics of production: Research on the politics of production arose as a critique
of standard social science as the handmaiden of the status quo (Dahrendorf, 1967), and it grew
with the rising concerns in the sociology and philosophy of science about the flawed assumptions
of objectivity in inquiry (Mulkay, 1974). Although the basis for discussing the values of
investigators in determining the research process was established early, studies of the effects of
funding agencies and broader social contexts on knowledge production came later and are
empirically less well-developed. In early investigations, it was assumed that “hard sciences”
were immune to the problems of politics of production due to the high level of consensus around
what constitutes the core and the frontier of inquiry. Social and behavioral sciences, in
contrast—particularly those concerned with applications such as education—were assumed to be
rife with potential for political influence. Empirical investigations suggest that epistemological
uncertainty is more similar than different between “hard” and “soft” sciences (Cole, 1992;
Knorr-Cetina, 1981). Debates about sampling for the census, which pit scientists and politicians
On opposite sides, with the Bureau of the Census in between, provide instructive reminders that
educational researchers are not alone. While this emerging information gives no real solace to
educational scholars concerned with policy influence, it does suggest that the issue of the politics
of production remains an important topic of investigation. Politics of production in any field,
including CTE, are most likely to be found in areas of controversy. There is relatively little
research on this topic in CTE in the United States, but the issue seems far more prominent in
countries with centralized educational policy systems, such as New Zealand and Australia. This
does not mean, of course, that politics are not a component of the research that is funded (or not)
in the United States, but it does suggest that politics in U.S. educational research may be more
subtle.

Inadvertent politics of production: Scholarly commentaries on the inadvertent politics of
research often sound like habituated whining. Overt discrimination against minority scholars in
CTE research is no longer the main issue. Rather, we ignore scholarship that finds expression
(and publication) outside the mainstream of “standard” vocational education journals. The
problem of inadvertent politics lies squarely in the structure of our research communities.
Careless ERIC searches and inattentive efforts to assist non-traditional scholars to find
publication outlets in mainstream journals sustain the traditionally limited access to policy
influence. Recent searches of ERIC suggest that mainstream U.S. CTE journals are not

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© poor procedures for dealing with good and poor information that they do acquire; and

© inadequate processes for involving key constituencies—sources of information and
support—in all of the above functions.

These problems of organization, which prevent collective focus on student learning, constant
attention to classroom processes, and effective means for dealing with the many organizational
problems of schools, have become particular barriers to creating success in high schools for all
students. Thus, it is important for CTE professionals to understand the organizational barriers
that impede their ability to use research to improve instructional practices.

Relationships between Production and Use

As Havelock (1969) notes, previous research led to the conclusion that there was no simple,
direct line between knowledge production and utilization. Huberman (1994) notes the many
challenges to a rational model of knowledge use but chooses to review the subtleties of the
existing paradigm as it has emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s. To summarize his arguments
(which have been elaborated above in reference to CTE), he argues that five factors, at least in
education, have demonstrated strong empirical relationships with knowledge utilization. These
include

1. The context of research, including characteristics of the knowledge base and the
motivation of the researcher to disseminate to practitioners;

2. The user’s context, including factors ranging from perceived needs to the
3. perception of the value of the research information;
4. Formal mechanisms to link knowledge with intended users;

5. The impacts of context and linkages on the resources, including attention, time, and
acceptability of the research; and

6. The amount of effort expended, creating an appropriate environment for use, which
includes both the amount and quality of the dissemination effort, the usability of the
knowledge, and the quality of planning and execution in the using site.

Huberman’ perspective is consistent with the main lines of dissemination and utilization
research, which emphasize the dispersion of knowledge to multiple sites of practice. Huberman
notes that researchers and practitioners may have a reciprocal influence on each other, and
suggests that the need for sustained interactivity to promote research and knowledge utilization is
consistent with some elements of the contemporary constructivist approach to teaching. The
latter asserts that teachers’ practitioner knowledge is constructed, largely by individuals, through
both reflective practice (Schén, 1983) and through more disciplined inquiry, such as action
research (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Mooney, 1999). This perspective is more consistent with
emerging ideas about dissemination and utilization that are associated with school improvement
research—an emphasis on the uniqueness of schools, on the importance of local development
activity, and on the centrality of school culture and leadership to improvement (and even
effectiveness) (Newmann & Associates, 1996).

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CONTEXTS FOR USE

Much of the dissemination research in career and technical education focuses on instances
when a decisionmaker considers findings of research to solve problems (Ricketts, 1982). But, it
is important to acknowledge that most decisionmakers can’t afford to be systematic knowledge
users. Organizational and systemic problems arise, and often need to be solved, in short order.
The “popping up” of long-ignored knowledge makes most instances of research use appear, on
the surface, as inadvertent. Decisions, particularly at lower levels in an organization, are often
driven by research-to-practice decisions made earlier. As Weiss (1980) argues, the impact of
research on practice or policy is often very subtle:

When decisions accrete through small, uncoordinated steps taken in many offices—by staffs
who have little awareness of the policy direction that is being promoted or the alternatives
that are being foreclosed—there is scant opportunity for deliberate application of research
information to the task. (p. 382)

The nature of decisionmaking, itself, within the contexts of schools, districts, and
government agencies, also plays a part, according to Weiss:

Many problems and issues are dealt with simultaneously, and consideration of each one goes
on over a protracted period ... each person takes some small step (writes a memo, answers an
inquiry, edits the draft of a regulation) that has seemingly small consequences. But over a
period of time, these many small steps foreclose alternative courses of action and limit the
range of the possible. Almost imperceptibly, a decision has been made, without anyone’s
awareness that he or she was deciding. (p. 401)

In addition, people in educational settings have many different motivations for using
knowledge, and they look for knowledge from outside of their own experience for a similarly
divergent set of reasons. These may include (but are certainly not limited to)

e New situations: CTE educators at all levels may encounter problems or issues that
perplex them. Even before a decision needs to be made, most people seek information to
help them clarify the true nature of the issue or- problem. This form of knowledge-seeking
and use is typically referred to as enlightenment.

« Decisions: New situations sometimes require decisions. When they do, and the decision
maker(s) feel that the situation is novel, they are more likely to seek information.

e Needs assessment: When faced with a new situation where there is limited information or
experience to guide a decision, active information seeking often occurs—particularly
when it is not clear that a change would be beneficial.

« Lack of expertise: In general, people prefer to rely on local sources of expertise—the
most local of which is oneself. When decision opportunities cannot be addressed locally,
the costs of not making a decision are high, and experts are easily available, most people
look for advice.

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Mooney, M. (1999). Vocational special needs educators as action researchers. Journal for
Vocational Special Needs Education, 21, 27-33.

Mort, P. R. (1963). Studies in educational innovation from the Institute of Administrative
Research: An overview. In M. Miles (Ed.), Innovation in education (pp. 316-328). New
York: Teachers College Press.

Mulkay, M. (1974). Methodology in the sociology of science. Social Science Information, 13,
163-171.

Natriello, G., Pallas, A., & McDill, E. (1990). Schooling disadvantaged children: Racing against
catastrophe. New York: Teachers College Press.

Newmann, F. M., & Associates. (1996). Authentic achievement: Restructuring schools for
intellectual quality. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Pallas, A., Natriello, G., & McDill, E. (1989). The changing nature of the disadvantaged
population: Current dimensions and future trends. Educational Researcher, 18, 16-22.

Ricketts, S. (1982). The impact of vocational research and development: A literature review.
Murphreesboro: Middle Tennessee State University.

Rist, R. (1970). Social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto
education. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 411-451.

Rogers, E. M. (1992). Prospectus for a cooperative extension system in education. Knowledge:
Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 13, 248-255.

Rosenbaum, J. (1996). Policy uses of research on the high school-to-work transition [Special
Issue]. Sociology of Education, 102-122.

Ryan, R. (1999). How TAFE became unresponsive: A study of rhetoric as a tool of educational
policy. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Vocational Education Research, 7,
105-126. .

Schultz, E. (1989). Controversies in education policy and the tasks of science. Western European
Education, 21, 6-18.

Schon, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner. London: Temple.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New
York: Doubleday.

Smink, J. (1985). Vocational education research on the decline—Rx: Dissemination. Journal of
Vocational Education Research, 10, 1-14.

Stegé, E., Gielen, K., Glatter, R., & Hord, S. (1987). The role of school leaders in school
improvement. Leuven, Belgium: ACCO.

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KNOWLEDGE USE (AND DISSEMINATION)

In the previous section, we looked at knowledge use from the perspective of a
disseminator; now we turn to the knowledge user’s perspective on dissemination. Early findings
on dissemination research identify relevance as key to knowledge use (Louis & Dentler, 1988;
Louis & Perlman, 1985). If practitioners see a match between their perceived needs and the
information provided, the probability that some use will occur is very high. Much of the
information available from computerized retrieval bases—such as ERIC—offer very little in the
way of “action implications” for the practitioner. The manpower needs required to screen
information thoroughly make impossible demands of retrieval staffs and field agents (i.e., the
practitioners).

Following the lead of the well-regarded Rand change-agent study (Berman & McLaughlin,
1978), much of the early dissemination research focused on implementation Thus, the nature of
knowledge was buried in implementation studies. This approach is well-reflected in the career
and technical education literature in a seminal article by Ricketts (1982):

Educational research is of value primarily when it can be adapted or used
by educators to assist students in the learning process. (p. 9)

As dissemination research increasingly moved toward examining use, as well as the spread of
information, however, tensions arose around the nature of knowledge and how it affects use.
These tensions continue to define how many career and technical educators (and others) view
dissemination.

A constructivist perspective—increasingly popular among educators (Garrison, 1989)—.
suggests that (a) all educational knowledge is “local”; (b) all educational knowledge is contested
and partial, and there is no clear way to differentiate whether one knowledge claim is better than
another; and (c) all educational knowledge is political and influenced by the interests of those
who develop and/or use it.

e All knowledge is local. Local knowledge is a key feature of the landscape of change, but
most would agree that there is important knowledge that is not local. Knowledge created
elsewhere must, according to all theories, be compatible with existing belief structures,
diffuse rapidly throughout the organization field so that it becomes legitimized, have
utility in local sites, and be processed in ways that make it fit with local preferences.
Although a great deal of important knowledge may come from outside the organization,
this information is always combined with local knowledge (Geertz, 1983).

e All knowledge is contested and partial. This feature of postmodernism is supported by
most of the new theoretical advances. At the cognitive learning level, for example, the
contesting of knowledge is central to the learning process. The contested nature of
knowledge is a key element of political theory, and the primary element that leads many
(see Vickers, 1994, and Weiss, 1980) to conclude that there are numerous ways of using
knowledge, depending on the degree to which it is “solid”—e.g., meets truth and utility
tests.

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ADDRESSING DISSEMINATION:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAJOR FEDERAL PROGRAMS

In the 1970s, the United States experimented with a number of dissemination and knowledge
utilization projects that were designed to help schools improve and innovate (Clark, Lotto, &
Astuto, 1984; Dentler, Louis, Kell, Corwin, & Sieber, 1980; Miles, 1978). Since then, although
federally funded dissemination and knowledge utilization systems have been maintained, they
have not been expanded either in form or in operations, and there have been no new national
dissemination efforts except for federal support for the implementation of systemic school-wide
reform models (such as the R&D Utilization program of the mid-1970s, or the focus on “General
Purpose Dissemination” strategies of the late-1970s). Dissemination practitioners might very
well feel that their potential contribution to the current reform wave has been ignored in favor of
bully pulpit exhortations that call for leadership and vision. In the United States, we also have a
tendency, when pushed to answer questions about problems in the dissemination and knowledge
utilization system in all fields, to reply in a largely technocratic way (House, 1981). The federal
government funds considerable educational research, but this research is not being fully used.
Educators have questions for which they want answers, but they do not ask experts— in
education or in any other fields. The experts’ knowledge is not “useable” in current forms and
must be molded, translated, or developed in order to make it applicable. The key assumptions of
a technocratic perspective is that, if schools had more expertise at their fingertips, change efforts
would be more potent, longer lasting, and more effective in producing stronger results. Federal
dissemination policies emphasize that research goes from federally funded R&D centers and
regional laboratories to schools. This excludes movement from schools to R&D centers and labs
as exemplified in the recent (but canceled) Request For Proposals for a U.S. Department of
Education-funded R&D center that focuses on dissemination and knowledge utilization. CTE
dissemination programs, although more active in the 1970s and 1980s, were largely linked to the
overall educational dissemination efforts.

The underlying assumption of the CTE approach has been that knowledge is a “thing” that
simply needs to find a good home in schools. Nowhere is this bias more apparent than in the
worthy effort to define dissemination as consisting of four activities—spread, exchange, choice,
and implementation. This definition, first proposed in the mid-1970s (Smink, 1985), improved
on the previous assumption that the primary purpose of dissemination was to cast knowledge out
into the world of practice, under the theory that a good idea would ultimately be used. The later
approach incorporated ideas about communication as a two-way process and extended the
dissemination role to include support for actual changes. It nevertheless embodies the belief that
knowledge comes in definable, useable units that can be arrayed in front of the practitioners who
will choose something that will “solve their problems.” U.S. federal policies and the
dissemination system that they support reflect this assumption.

Another example of the proliferation of parallel dissemination systems in education is the
tendency for each federally funded categorical program to develop its own dissemination plan.
This leads to a major competition in federal dissemination and knowledge utilization policies
between general purpose dissemination (largely funded by the National Institute of Education)
and special purpose dissemination (largely funded by Office of Education programs such as Title

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Berman, P., & McLaughlin, M. W. (1978). Federal programs supporting educational change:
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Blunden, R. (1999b). Vocational education and training and conceptions of the self. Journal of
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Bordieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of
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Cibulka, J. (1999). Reflections on my experience as a policy advocate. Educational Policy, 13,
180-184.

Clark, D., Lotto, L. S., & Astuto, T. (1984). Effective schools and school improvement: A
comparative analysis of two lines of inquiry. Educational Administration Quarterly, 20,
41-68.

Cole, S. (1992). Making science: Between nature and society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

Corwin, R., & Louis, K. (1982). Organizational barriers to knowledge use. Administrative
Science Quarterly, 27, 623-640.

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SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR DISSEMINATION IN CTE

This review has been deliberately wide-ranging because its intent is to stimulate critical
thinking about dissemination in CTE, rather than to simply document what has worked until
now. We will briefly summarize some of the implications for dissemination practice:

e Research knowledge generated in universities or research institutes is only one source of
knowing, and its use must be negotiated during a dissemination process. This fluid
relationship—and even interdependence—between research and practice must be
acknowledged, and researchers must be prepared to be open to involvement in the
development process at the user level. If this is true for “gold standard” science, it is
particularly true for social science and CTE research, which are less likely to be gold
standard. Much of the best practice in education is not generated by scholars in
laboratories, but by teachers and school leaders in actual settings.

¢ In addition to the advancement of knowledge by practitioners, the spread of new ideas
in education is frequently aided by researchers who may codify and extend practice-
based knowledge as well as make independent contributions to it. In many cases,
researchers may not be as well-equipped to engage in field-based development over long
periods of time (they have students and new research projects to carry out), but may fulfill
this function if they have a deep understanding of the emerging nature of the negotiated
knowledge.

© The main barriers to knowledge use, at least in CTE, are not at the level of individual
resistance, but lie in the rigidities induced in institutionalized organizational fields,
organizational designs that do not foster learning, and political agendas that are not
consistent with the information. Changing these interorganizational rigidities in the short
run may be extremely difficult. The motto under these circumstances is not to engage in
Sisyphysian efforts, but to try again another day, because contextual circumstances change
for reasons that have nothing to do with research or educational policy.

« The barriers to knowledge utilization are often to be found in organizational design. This
suggests that redesigning the school or technical college should be part of any effort to
engage in sustained interactivity around research utilization.

© Some forms of useful knowledge will spread with little dissemination effort—due to
organizational field compatibility or because the field develops an infrastructure to assess
and legitimate the type of knowledge. We do not always need elaborate infrastructures or
sustained interactivity to ensure the incorporation of new ideas in practice.

© Utilization and impact can only be assessed over the long haul. Short-run efforts to
foster major utilization are likely to appear shallow and hegemonic to practitioners, and to
fail to disrupt the interorganizational rigidities of the field. Policy makers and
disappointed researchers are likely to view these efforts as failures, and to pronounce
schools as impossible to change. Thus, research-based efforts to create school reform must
be conducted on an extended timeline.

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INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this review is to examine what we know about dissemination, based on both
the literature that refers specifically to Career and Technical Education (CTE), and that which is
drawn from education and related fields. Ricketts’ (1982) literature review indicated that
research on the dissemination of vocational education products was “slightly negative to strongly
negative,” and that “[T]he understanding of dissemination’s role in the process of innovation and
change is much too weak” (p. 3). After reviewing the published literature in the field, it appears
that his assessment nearly two decades ago cannot be easily challenged. Thus, our purpose is to
introduce issues that may advance the CTE dissemination field, rather than to validate current
“best practice.”

Research on dissemination in vocational, career, and technical education is limited. A search
of ERIC for all years that included dissemination as a keyword produced a list of over 16,562
documents. Of these, only 1,295 also included the keywords vocational, career, or technical
education, and many of these are the regular series of government abstracts of research (ARM).
Furthermore, most of the research on dissemination in vocational education occurred in the
1970s and 1980s, while it has continued as a stronger theme in education in general. In the past
decade, only nine journal articles that mention dissemination have been published in vocational
education journals, and in most of these, dissemination is addressed as an implication or minor
topic, rather than as central.

Yet, interest in dissemination and knowledge use on the part of federal agencies is increasing,
after a period of neglect. Not only is there a funded dissemination center in vocational education,
but there is also a dissemination theme in the National Research Center for Career and Technical
Education. This increased emphasis is not surprising: The quality and quantity of research in
vocational education, as in other educational fields, has increased markedly and has significant
implications for practice. At the same time, the public is concerned that career and technical
education programs are under-performing, and CTE educators are energetically engaged in
efforts to redefine the field to put it at the center of new visions for American education. This
review will, as a consequence, be wide-ranging, and will incorporate ideas about dissemination
from other fields within-education, and occasionally from outside of education.

In all cases, our intent is to provide a link between the state of CTE today, and what is known
about how best to get research (or promising programs and strategies that have been validated)
into practice in multiple settings. First, we define what we mean by dissemination in order to
more clearly identify the parameters of this review. Second, we provide a brief overview of
federal efforts to promote dissemination of research-based information in education. Based on
these two sections, we turn to the topic of defining some of the roles of disseminators and users.
In the fourth and fifth sections of the paper we turn to the relationship between dissemination and
knowledge use, and look at some of the empirically tested theories about when and where
research gets into practice. The sixth and seventh sections address unresolved quandaries in
dissemination and knowledge use that often preoccupy both researchers and disseminators: How
useable is “educational knowledge?” How does educational knowledge influence policy? How
do the specific characteristics of the settings that are targeted for dissemination and use affect the
likelihood of success? Finally, we turn to some implications for dissemination policy and
practice.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Dissemination Defined

Addressing Dissemination: A Brief History of Major Federal Programs

The Land Grant Extension System Model .
The Development of the Educational Resources Information Centers (ERIC).........ss000008

The Regional Laboratory System ..........scsssssssscsecsecsesssessessenssesecesecsscsusenesesasssesnscseeaesseenseneesesees 7

Who Disseminates? To WhOM?............scecsscsecsecncseeeesseessesnecsnssessessesensseessesnesneeesesseesstssessesseesesseeeeee LL

Dissemination (and Knowledge Use) ......ssssssssssccssssecnssssesssesecnssenecseessscssseesssssessnessssssesseeeenteareas 13

Knowledge Use (and Dissemination)

Research as Practical Knowledge: An Uneasy Relationship
Alternative Views of the Intersection of Research and POlicy.......ssssssssssssesssessnssssssssestecsseessaneesae 19

Contexts fOr USC.......ssessecssesssesssesnessssssssssessssessessesssssasssaessseessnsesessnaesauesneessnsssessestessansssnessnsenessasesaeen 21

Socioeconomic Conditions and Dissemination or Knowledge Use....
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Use in CTE..........ssssesssssssssssssssssssessesssessnesssesseeesees 29

Relationships between Production and USe........sssssssssessssesessssessseisssseessseesssvecssneesssessnseenses 25

Some Implications for Dissemination in CTE

References «0.0.2... seccescececssecsessscessaeeressesessssesssssesseesessstaessessusseccassussessssssesesssassacsesseneanessneseesanssennssnees 33

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e All knowledge is political. Insofar as the newer theories address power, there is a
tendency to follow Mulkay’s (1974) assumption that “knowledge is power” and that the
creation of knowledge creates powerful settings (including constraints). None of the
perspectives reviewed here adopt, however, the critical postmodernist perspective, in
which the power associated with knowledge is viewed as an instrument of oppression.
Cognitive learning psychologists, for example, do not find that children who temporarily
have knowledge that others lack use this power to dominate. Nevertheless, political
contexts are critical to understanding knowledge use, as is demonstrated by the analysis of
knowledge utilization among policy makers, and observations that knowledge use is
constrained as the organizational field becomes defined both by internal norms or patterns
and by external expectations or regulation.

A “non critical theory” approach might differentiate between knowledge and information:
Information can be easily transferred, but until it is interpreted, either by the individual or the
group, it does not become useable knowledge (Louis, 1994). This position is consistent with a
long line of mainstream sociological research that emphasizes the importance of socially
constructed frames of reference that make learning at both the individual and group levels
possible—a position that predates the current wave of postmodernist thinking by several decades
(Berger & Luckmann, 1966). The separation between knowledge and information is what drives
some dissemination models discussed later in this paper.

While these reviewed perspectives are consistent with some of the basic tenets of
postmodernist views of knowledge, they also assume that knowledge has some “real” or “true”
qualities, and individuals who have not created it can use it. The use process is complex and
difficult to predict, but messy cannot be equated with impossible. In fact, we may draw some
lessons for dissemination and knowledge use from Bordieu and Wacquant (1992) in this regard:

[T]here exists, within the social world, and particularly within the academic world, a
whole nexus of institutions whose effect is to render acceptable the gap between the
objective truth of the world and the lived truth of what we are and what we do in it. ... It
is this double truth, objective and subjective, which constitutes the whole truth of the
social world. (pp. 254-255)

In other words, we cannot reasonably expect that the overpowering truth and utility of our
best research, no matter how attractively it is formatted, will always (or even often) strike most
practitioners or policy makers. In order to transfer knowledge, the dissemination professional
must also have some understanding of the subjective truth of the potential user(s) (Blunden,
1999a, 1999b).

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Individuals learn best when they interact with peers and relate new
ideas to an existing core of shared knowledge.

Peers challenge each others’ assumptions and encourage one another to rethink their ideas.
However, the learner must reach a minimal level of understanding of the content to make peer
interaction processes effective in knowledge sharing. While Huberman and Broderick do not
note this, it also assumes that the group has certain characteristics—that there is a shared
“culture” at some level, and that there is a level of familiarity that permits communication of
challenges in ways that are not excessively threatening. Their perspective draws on Vygotsky
(1986), who argues that inter-personal processes must be translated into intra-personal
processes before learning can be said to have occurred. Thus, their emphasis is largely on the
way in which individual researchers and practitioners enter into relationships with one another
that cause them, as individuals, to change their assumptions and even their behaviors.

The notion that thinking is “irreducibly a social practice” implies that dissemination and
utilization are best thought of as a process of reflection, in which people with different but
overlapping knowledge and culture meet to consider their common concerns (Huberman &
Broderick, 1995, p. 21). Arguably, dissemination and utilization not only encourage reflection,
but the two components are so closely linked that we cannot have one without the other. Just as
students master concepts more effectively when they teach others, researchers (or those who
operate on the edge of applicable knowledge) gain greater clarity about their own work through
direct dissemination to practitioners.

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Organizational Learning and Knowledge Use in CTE

The organizational learning perspective, popularized in business settings (Senge, 1990) and

rapidly diffusing into education, argues that we need to look at how schools (i.e., organizations)
~ use knowledge—which may be different from the ways in which individuals use knowledge.

Organizational learning begins with a social constructivist perspective: Knowledge is not useable
at the local site until it has been “socially processed” through some collective discussion and
agreement on its validity and applicability (Louis, 1994). Organizations that are more effective in
using knowledge have certain characteristics—for example, they have more closely linked
internal communication networks, and more individuals serve in boundary-spanning roles where
they legitimately bring in new ideas from the outside (Daft & Huber, 1987; Senge, 1990).
Conversely, organizations that don’t learn—even from information that they request—are
characterized by. internal boundaries, competition, excessive individual entrepreneurship, and
lack of continuity in personnel (Corwin & Louis, 1982).

Three features of school culture and practice—memory, knowledge base and development,
and information distribution and interpretation—can also have a big impact on teachers’ ability
to sustain openness to learning (Louis, Kruse, & Raywid, 1996):

e Shared memory consists of collective understandings that are developed in an
organization over time. Positive shared memories from previous learning situations create
an openness to future learning; conversely, memories based on bad experiences act as
barriers to new learning efforts. In CTE, shared memory can be a constraint; i.e., faculty
members may remember a “golden age” when CTE programs were central in
comprehensive high schools, and want to recreate the past (Louis & Miles, 1990).

« Individual knowledge: CTE teachers possess knowledge about the curriculum and their
own instructional methods, but they do not always have a common language or the skills
to engage in serious conversations about their practice—particularly across programs.
Furthermore, research suggests that CTE teachers are somewhat isolated from other
teachers in many comprehensive high schools, which means that their knowledge and
expertise about teaching has less influence than it should (Little, 1995a, 1995b). Thus, to
create a dynamic learning environment in school, we usually need more than individual
knowledge—a major issue in CTE where core and technical programs sometimes appear
to be competing for student enrollment.

« Knowledge distribution systems: An information base is not enough. Teachers must also
interpret and distribute information before it becomes knowledge that is applicable across
classrooms. Joint efforts to interpret information must provide a foundation for
challenging existing beliefs about the school, or previous views of teaching and learning
remain unchanged (Brown, 1995). A genuine understanding of an innovation or the basis
on which it rests is necessary if teachers are to apply the new information in the
classroom.

National Research Center for Career and Technical Education 23

“A
4

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DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 461 768 CE 082 920

AUTHOR Louis, Karen Seashore; Jones, Lisa M.

TITLE Dissemination with Impact: What Research Suggests for
Practice in Career and Technical Education.

INSTITUTION National Research Center for Career and Technical Education,
St. Paul, MN.

SPONS AGENCY Office of Vocational and Adult Education (ED), Washington,
De.

PUB DATE 2001-00-00

NOTE 37p.

CONTRACT VO51A990006

AVAILABLE FROM NDCCTE Product Sales Office, Ohio State University, 1900
Kenny Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1090 (Order code: RR1010,
$7.50 plus $5 shipping). Tel: 800-678-6011 ext. 24277; Tel:
614-292-4277; Fax: 614-688-3258; Fax: 614-292-1260; e-mail:
ndccte@osu.edu. For full text:
https: //www.nccte.org/publications/infosynthesis/r&dreport/D
isseminationALL_Seashore.pdf

PUB TYPE Reports - Evaluative (142)
EDRS PRICE MFO1/PCO2 Plus Postage.
DESCRIPTORS Access to Information; Adoption (Ideas); Adult Education;

Delivery Systems; Diffusion (Communication); *Educational
Change; *Information Dissemination; Information Transfer;
*Information Utilization; Knowledge Base for Teaching;
Policy Formation; Postsecondary Education; *Research
Utilization; Resistance to Change; Secondary Education;
Technology Transfer; *Theory Practice Relationship; Users
(Information) ; *Vocational Education

IDENTIFIERS *Career and Technical Education

ABSTRACT

Dissemination in career and technical education does not
simply disperse information, new products, new practices and materials, and
new ideas designed to stimulate local change but does so in ways that promote
its use. Federal efforts to promote dissemination of research-based
information in education are: (1) deeply indebted to the agricultural
extension model; (2) traditionally focused on the dissemination, rather than
knowledge use side of the equation;. (3) often a set of uncoordinated
activities; and (4) a largely top-down, research-to-practice focused, rather
than bottom-up, problem solving focused approach. Disseminators may be best
thought of as linking agents positioned to move research into practice.
Elements of a knowledge use model of dissemination are the following: (1)
capitalize on incentives for change; (2) provide knowledge useable for
practitioners; (3) create shared understandings of how new ideas could help
improve local practice; (4) stimulate increased diffusion of new ideas within
and between educational agencies; and (5) combine top-down and bottom-up
approaches. As for the knowledge user/educator's perspective on
dissemination, a constructivist perspective suggests all knowledge is local,
contested, partial, and political. Unresolved quandaries in dissemination and
knowledge use are how useable educational knowledge is; how it influences
policy; and how contexts for dissemination and use affect the likelihood of
success. Implications for dissemination practice and policy are identified.
(Contains 67 references.) (¥LB)

Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made
from the original document.



Dissemination With Impact

need to justify and maintain ERIC still drives dissemination policy. This has an unintended
consequence of skewing dissemination policy in general toward a knowledge-base driven
approach, rather than a problem solving approach.

The Regional Laboratory System

The regional laboratories initiated in the mid-1960s were intended as a mechanism to renew
education through development. Inherently intended as research-utilizing agencies, the regional
laboratory system became the backbone of the general purpose dissemination system of the federal
government—.e., dissemination activities that serve the broad needs of schools, rather than the
special needs of a targeted program. Nevertheless, despite their central position, they have been
systematically bypassed in a number of the most critical knowledge utilization and school
improvement experiments—including the Pilot State Dissemination Project, the R&D Utilization
Program, the National Diffusion Network, and others. This isolation of the regional laboratories
from other federal thrusts in school improvement is typical of the tendency of federal policies to
promote competition and experimentation, rather than integration, of activities to support
improvement. The emphasis in federal policy on the “with and through” role of labs—that they are
not to work directly with schools in most instances, but to work with other agencies, such as state
departments of education, to provide services—additionally underscores their position as providers
of knowledge, rather than as activists in reform.

Special Purpose Assistance

One of the major competitions in federal support policies is between general purpose
dissemination and special purpose assistance—the latter being funded out of programs such as
Title I/Chapter I, desegregation funds, bilingual programs, and OVAE. These programs have often
funded assistance centers that provide technical help regarding the special needs of program
recipients.

In CTE, the National Network for Curriculum Coordination in Vocational and Technical
Education (NNCCVTE) was established in 1972 by the Office of Education, with six regional
curriculum coordination centers (CCCs).

These centers were founded to:
e Develop and disseminate curriculum
e Provide training and assistance
e Field-test and evaluate new curricula
e Link practitioners and curriculum developers through state curriculum
. representatives (SLRs)
e Exchange information about curriculum (Smink, 1985).

One of the major characteristics of special purpose dissemination centers was isolation from
both broader strands of school improvement legislation, and from each other. Because these
dissemination efforts were (are) funded by specialized programs or agency divisions, coordination
between them was (is) non-existent. Rather than promoting overall school improvement, they

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I/Chapter I, desegregation funds, and bilingual programs).' The assistance centers funded by the
latter programs provide technical help and information regarding the special needs of recipients
of program funds. Because they are sponsored by the individual programs rather than by a single
dissemination agency, coordination between them is limited-to-non-existent. The following
section describes the dissemination models established within various federal programs.

The Land Grant Extension System Model

The United States pioneered the role of research as a means of improving practice when the
federal government established the land grant college system that included a link between funded
institutions with the needs of state agricultural and rural communities through extension services.
The notion that research knowledge can be used to answer specific questions of practice was, for a
long time, a peculiarly American phenomenon. The extension system model operates, of course,
on the belief that there is a need for intermediate, locally available offices responsible for
increasing communication between the university and “the field.” Extension agents answer
questions raised by individuals through consulting both research findings and researchers located at
the state’s land grant university. Researchers use extension agents as a vehicle through which new,
applied findings can be rapidly communicated to the field.

While it has left us with a system of universities and a model that has proven, over the years, to
be highly effective, the extension model has also constrained the way in which we think about
dissemination and knowledge utilization. The extension system, until recently, has been set up
largely to serve the needs of individuals; the problems of education, however, are invariably
associated with the functioning of schools as organizational units. In‘addition, because schools
exist in highly politicized environments, the constant independent streams of actors, problems,
competing solutions, and crises (March & Olsen, 1974) complicate the elegant simplicity of
extension’s technology transfer model.”

The Development of the Educational Resources Information Centers (ERIC)

The ERIC system was developed in response to the deeply held (and accurate) belief that one
of the problems with the low levels of research utilization in education that were routinely
discussed in the 1950s and early-1960s was the inaccessibility of research. However, ERIC was
developed without any corresponding thought given to how educators would actually use the
system. ERIC, as designed, was not, and is still not, “user friendly.” But, since so much was
invested in creating it, the need to build ERIC into any dissemination policies was unquestioned.
Indeed, the first efforts of the federal government to launch more active dissemination strategies
(the Pilot State Dissemination Project, designed in the late-1960s and funded from 1970-1972)
was specifically intended to focus on improving ERIC’s use for teachers and administrators. The

' The distinction between general purpose and special purpose dissemination was articulated in a Request For
Proposals to study dissemination activities in states and regional laboratories funded by the National Institute of
Education, The RFP was issued in 1979, but the authors regret that they are unable to locate a copy of it.

2 It is important to emphasize that, as the state extension systems confront major changes in the nature of farming
and rural populations, their structure and purposes have also changed and have become more complex.

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materials, and does not emphasize the importance of changes in practice and educational
improvements in schools. Policies supporting technology-based dissemination should not
ignore the evidence of the human factor.

© The U.S. CTE dissemination system has been almost exclusively producer-driven.
Consideration should be given to developing systems that include practitioners as
partners, action research, and other forms of constructivist-based dissemination.

© The CTE dissemination system, like the rest of the educational field, is not only
complex, but also not well-organized, and is, therefore, not user-friendly. Special-
purpose and general-purpose dissemination are disconnected from one another; significant
elements of the general-purpose system (e.g., regional laboratories, ERIC, and various
whole-school model programs) operate out of different government auspices than the
specialized CTE systems, and there is no formal expectation for coordination. Although
most parts of the system draw on ERIC, the dependence is not reciprocal. The result, from
the users’ perspective, is vast confusion over where (or even whether) to enter the system
to get help.

© The best-designed dissemination systems will fail in the absence of incentives for
knowledge use that can be stimulated through policy. Negative incentives (fear of failure
on standardized tests) provide insufficient motivation for knowledge use, although it clearly
changes educators’ behavior. In addition, knowledge use occurs in a problem-solving
context that is stimulated by an initiative, a program, an idea, or professional knowledge.

¢ Dissemination and its outcomes are virtually impossible to micro-manage from the
policy level. Dissemination is so dependent on the ability of those at lower levels to create
the appropriate environment for competent communication that its outcomes cannot be
directed easily from above. Even in a highly centralized system, complete control over
knowledge dissemination and use among a broad population is an ephemeral goal.

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© Creating sustained interactivity is not the only solution to the dissemination and
utilization problem, but, if it becomes a norm, it may well increase the scholarly impact
because it enlarges the field of CTE communication systems. We should not limit the
idea of sustained interactivity to the relationship between a “knowledge producer/
researcher” and “knowledge consumers/practitioners,” but focus also on formal and
informal networks for transmitting knowledge between units. These networks, to be
successful, must involve “practice templates” that combine research knowledge and
practice knowledge.

© There is a latent demand for research information among practitioners that is potentially
very great. Dissemination activities can be highly consistent with a bottom-up approach to
school improvement, and they can also support mandated changes. To effectively mediate
between mandates and local initiatives requires a flexible management structure that
emphasizes (a) communication and facilitation among all parts of the system and (b)
negotiation of complex short-term adaptive relationships with multiple audiences to achieve
longer-range goals.

Our review also suggests some implications for dissemination policy in CTE:

© Coordination between knowledge producers (universities) and potential knowledge users
(schools and technical colleges) needs continued policy attention. There have always been
laments about the gap between the university and the schools, and problems of spanning
differences in culture, language, and goals are viewed as contributing to the problem of
utilization. Recent research (Huberman, 1994) suggests that this is not inevitable, and that if
schools are involved in faculty research throughout its conduct, the chances of utilization
are greatly increased, as are the probabilities of future collaboration and exchange. Of
particular interest in this study is that spillover effects—long considered in the industrial
technology-transfer literature to be critical to economic development—are strongly related
to sustained linkages during the research.”

¢ Use of technology has been a major focus of many recent efforts to link CTE information
and schools (Budke, 1989). Much effort has been focused, for example, on career education
databases that are designed to help students determine what kinds of CTE programs are
valuable to them personally. Unfortunately, many advocates of dissemination by technology
also support the marketing approach that was prominent in the late-1970s and early-1980s,
which focuses on assessing the quality of dissemination efforts by criteria such as the
number of “hits,” inclusion in ERIC, and objective assessments of the quality of the

3 Professional development/professional practice schools are an example of a particular type of university-school
collaborative that has become relatively common. The relationships, initially conceived of as a way to improve teacher
training and deliver staff development, are sustained through mutual benefits beyond this limited goal. Unfortunately,
CTE programs have often been junior partners in the professional practice school movement, which has focused on
training and professional development of teachers in “core subjects.” As a consequence, CTE teachers in universities
and schools have benefited less from the resources that have gone into these endeavors, or have operated in isolation
from their colleagues in other disciplines.

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DISSEMINATION DEFINED

The dictionary defines the verb to disseminate as “‘to scatter or spread widely, as though
sowing seed; promulgate extensively; broadcast; disperse.” This definition, which reflects the
common understanding of the word, does not adequately reflect the underlying assumptions found
in 50 years of social science research on the dissemination of information. A more recent
definition, articulated in a volume dealing with educational change, indicates that:

Dissemination consists of purposive, goal-oriented communication of information or
knowledge that is specific and potentially useable, from one social system to another.
(Louis & van Velzen, 1988, p. 261)

In other words, the intent of dissemination in education is not simply to disperse information,
but to do so in ways that promote its use. The goal is improvement and change in educational
organizations and systems, and in individual practice. We may see use, innovation, or
implementation as possible measures of whether an attempt to spread information was effective.
However, it is incorrect to assume that innovation processes and dissemination are equivalent.

The dictionary definition, because it is generic, also ignores a facet of dissemination that is
taken for granted in research—what is being sown. Early research in dissemination focused on
what happened to new research products—for example, hybrid seed corn or a recently introduced
drug. As the research moved into the field of education, however, it was faced with the reality of
educational change, which often occurs as a consequence of ideas; rather than as tangible products.
One of the first investigations in education, for example, examined the spread of kindergarten
programs between districts.

Thus, when we look at dissemination in career and technical education,
we must focus on new products, new practices and materials, and new
ideas that are designed to stimulate local change.

The social science definition also implies intentionality of human action, and it implicitly
focuses on the role of dissemination professionals ... any individuals whose job definition
includes a responsibility for increasing the flow and use of knowledge between subsystems
within the educational system. This definition eliminates a lot of “sowing activities” that may
result in changes in behavior, such as routine communication between colleagues, or casual
transfer of information that is not explicitly intended to affect knowing or behaving.
Nevertheless, dissemination research has increasingly focused on the importance of regular
communication channels as a feature of dissemination systems that work.

Probably one of the most important developments in defining a theory of dissemination is the
increased focus on the social processes related to dissemination. Huberman and Broderick
(1995) argue that “the most hopeful new avenue of inquiry in the D&U literature emerges when
dissemination takes place ... through ... sustained interactions between researchers and
practitioners” (pp. 3-4), a point that is central to the renewed theory of dissemination. They
further explore the conditions under which sustained interaction may result in increased meaning
on the part of both creators and users. Central to their argument is the idea of socially shared
cognition that dominates the field of individual cognitive development (Brown, 1995).

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publishing large numbers of critical theory articles—whether this is a result of editorial policy or
conformity in the field is unclear. Where few articles are published, dissemination systems are
generally held as not guilty of discrimination, although research-to-practice journals are, in most
educational fields, a component of the national dissemination system.

Relationships between production and consumption of research: This representation
contrasts with the field of dissemination and knowledge utilization, in which perhaps more than
50% of the research focuses on research(er)-user relationships. Bedard (1999) and Louis and
Perlman (1985) treat an issue that has been covered unsystematically for some time—the
structured interactions between those who commission research and the researchers. These authors
note that commissions typically generate literature reviews and even research by noted scholars,
but typically do not use it fully unless there is a great deal of interaction between the scholars and
commission members. Cibulka (1999) raises issues that are central to current studies of research
utilization but are rarely systematically investigated—the politics of research funding and
subsequent use—an issue of particular relevance to CTE, where research funding sources are
largely limited to federal agencies with mature policy agendas that reflect the tendency of the
federal government to pursue marketing strategies to promote knowledge use. Existing research in
this cell suggests additional profitable arenas for inquiry. Huberman (1994), for example, lays out
a theory of relationships between producer and consumer that are premised on the power of
sustained interactivity.

If we wish policy research to be used,
we need to spend time working with potential users.

The nature of knowledge and information that is disseminated is critical in determining use.
Any information that is transmitted has different characteristics, depending on the context in which
it is inserted because, as we argue, knowledge has meaning only when it is interpreted through the
human mind. Knowledge is used because it is engaging or compelling, and because the person
presented with it can imagine how it would apply to him or her.

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Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980) were among the first to propose that knowledge produced

through more-or-less rigorous inquiry needs to pass two types of tests before it is used: There is a
truth test, which helps the individual or group looking at the information to decide whether it is a
reasonable approximation of “reality,” but there is also a utility test, by which the same groups
determine whether or not it can be applied given a set of constraints, which could range from
financial to potential negative consequences not considered in the research. Thus,

generalizations and ideas from a number of studies come into currency indirectly—through
articles in academic journals and journals of opinions, stories in the media, the advice of
consultants, lobbying by special interest groups, conversation of colleagues, attendance at
conferences or training programs, and other uncatalogued sources. (Weiss, 1982, p. 622)

According to Weiss (1982), assumptions about use have five major constructs in the popular

and academic pictures of decision making:

© Boundedness—‘decision-making is, in effect, set off from the ongoing stream of
organizational activity. It involves a discrete set of actors who occupy authoritative
positions, people who are officially responsible for, and empowered to make, decisions for
the organization.” (pp. 624-625)

e Purposiveness—‘they [decision makers] are expected to have overt criteria for what is
good enough and to seek a decision that promises progress toward attaining their
purposes.” (p. 625)

© Calculation—“Decision makers are expected to generate (or have generated for them) a
set of alternatives. ... Their calculation will often be informal and intuitive rather than
systematic, as they proceed on the basis of experience, informed judgment, or gut
feeling.” (p. 625)

© Perceived significance—“A decision marks a step of some moment. People who make the
decision perceive the act as consequential (i.e., having consequences).” (p. 625)

© Sequential order—‘The sequence is regarded as beginning with recognition of a problem.
It proceeds to the development and consideration of alternative means of coping with the
problem, goes next to assessment of the relative advantages of the alternatives, and ends
with selection of a decision.” (p. 626)

Alternative routes to policy and practice—reliance on custom and implicit rules;
improvisation; mutual adjustment; accretion; negotiation; move and
countermove; a window for solutions; and indirection—are the most common
ways that schools and technical colleges approach the imposition of research
results on their organization settings. Research is often viewed as ‘a device of
control’ rather than a source of help. (Weiss, 1982, p. 630)

26

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Dissemination With Impact

Dissemination With Impact:
What Research Suggests for Practice in
Career and Technical Education

Karen Seashore Louis
Lisa M. Jones
University of Minnesota

National Research Center for Career and Technical Education
University of Minnesota
1954 Buford Avenue
St. Paul, Minnesota, 55108-6197

Supported by

The Office of Vocational and Adult Education
U.S. Department of Education

2001

National Research Center for Career and Technical Education i


Dissemination With Impact

WHO DISSEMINATES? TO WHOM?

Our description of dissemination as an intentional social process of communicating materials,
products, and new ideas, implies that there is a person who disseminates. While we have referred
above to “dissemination professionals” as a class, we also know a great deal about what makes a
good disseminator. There is considerable agreement, based on network studies, that
disseminators may be best thought of as linking agents (Junge, 1986; Rogers, 1992) or boundary
spanners (Harrison & Debs, 1988)—individuals or groups that are able to move between one
social system to another. These roles may be formally assigned (as they are in some large
companies between, say, research and marketing departments), or they may accrue to individuals
who are naturally placed to be effective in the role.

The only feature that linking agents have in common is that they are positioned to move
research into practice. They may be appointed individuals with formal dissemination
responsibilities as their primary function (Junge, 1986; Louis & Kell, 1981; Turnbull, 1994;),
influentials (Louis & Dentler, 1988), or gatekeepers (Klobas & McGill, 1995; Ricketts, 1982)
who are perceived as experts to whom others turn for reliable information. Those in rural or
underdeveloped areas have attempted to capitalize on local influentials by designating them as
key actors in knowledge dissemination. Efforts, for example, to increase the use of contraception
in less developed countries work more effectively if the person communicating the information
is a “wise woman” of the village, rather than a fresh-faced, unknown nurse. Dissemination
systems in educational reform have also targeted individuals of influence. For example, it is well
known that in almost all countries, principals have a great deal of influence over the “outside
information” that teachers attend to (Stegé, Gielen, Glatter, & Hord, 1987). Thus, researchers
who want to influence practice on a large scale may be more likely to target principal networks
as an audience—at least to raise awareness.

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Dissemination With Impact

negative incentives alone have produced relatively low levels of knowledge use. When mandates
permit choices and are combined with positive personal incentives (either material or
professional), use is very high. If information is proffered in a situation where individual
empowerment or significant professional development is promised, significantly greater personal
incentives are mobilized. Mandates may stimulate strong personal incentives under certain
conditions—namely, that professional rewards are visible, concrete, and personally meaningful.

Second, use implies action of some sort, and once information has been obtained,
individuals and groups must digest it, comprehend it, and decide what to do with it. Decision-
making involves assessing and analyzing whatever information happens to be available to the
individual or group making the decision. Decision-making often occurs in a social context where
there is some social processing of the information. Through assessment and social processing,
people “transform information by customizing and personalizing it for local use.” Research on
knowledge use shows that many people who receive potentially useful information do not
remember it at all; those who did recall information were also engaged in some degree of social
processing; and almost all said that the discussions that they had were instrumental in their
decisions about how to act on the information. Social processing appears to be important because
it helps to build or affirm commitment to information use (Louis, 1982).

Third, social processing was more likely to occur when the relationship between the agency
communicating the information and the recipient was characterized by some intensity. In the
world of busy practitioners, information that does not appear to have immediate relevance or
applicability is unlikely to be passed on with the strong endorsement that is typically required for
an indirect strategy to be effective. Some interpersonal contact as part of providing information
increases the likelihood that people will pay attention to it and begin the next level of social
processing that engages people in the possibility of change.

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This report is based on research conducted by the
National Research Center for Career and Technical Education
University of Minnesota

Distribution of this report is by the
National Dissemination Center for Career and Technical Education
The Ohio State University

This report and related information are available at www.nccte.com.
Additional printed, bound copies of the report are available from:

National Dissemination Center for Career and Technical Education
Product Sales Office
The Ohio State University
1900 Kenny Road
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1090
800-678-6011 ext. 24277
Fax: 614-688-3258


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National Library of Education (NLE)

Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)

NOTICE

Reproduction Basis

This document is covered by a signed "Reproduction Release

L) (Blanket)" form (on file within the ERIC system), encompassing all
or classes of documents from its source organization and, therefore,
does not require a "Specific Document" Release form.

This document is Federally-funded, or carries its own permission to
reproduce, or is otherwise in the public domain and, therefore, may
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(either "Specific Document" or "Blanket").

EFF-089 (3/2000)


Dissemination With Impact

The organizational learning perspective is critical when we consider the relationship of
dissemination and improvement theories in education. It suggests that the possibility for reaching
a school with new knowledge is not dependent on where the knowledge comes from or the
linkage mechanism, but on social characteristics of the school and its ability to process
information. While sustained interaction with a researcher might enhance utilization, it cannot
produce it in the absence of the structures and culture that encourage the development of a shared
knowledge base that will guide collective action. In this respect, Huberman’s (1994) focus on
school characteristics as a factor mediating knowledge use intersects clearly with emerging ideas
about school development and improvement.

A recent article in a management journal suggests that many corporations that claim to be
learning organizations are obsessed with information, but they don’t know how.to learn from it
(Macdonald, 1995). Instead of gathering useable knowledge that would help them improve their
importance, they establish vast empires of data, which has little relevance to the quality of their
core products. This is particularly problematic for CTE students’ learning outcomes, which are
often articulated poorly in state school performance measures.

Based on existing theory and empirical data, organizational learning is best thought of as a
conceptual tool for helping schools or other organizations focus on both the core objectives and
the ways of organizing how to get there. According to the early organizational theorists (based
on decades of research in human relations, cybernetics, management by objectives, and many
other trends), the primary barriers to becoming more effective lie in the domains of

1. qualitative and structural aspects of communication systems;
2. information processing; and
3. availability of high-quality, relevant information about performance.

These problems are not newly identified, but earlier responses to them have often been
oriented to shop-floor technical problems of organizations—in the common language, how to get
factory workers to participate in producing a better widget through minor modifications of
existing organizational practices. Alternatively, they examine issues that are largely human
relations problems that involve issues of morale, climate, and other preconditions for success.
Organizational learning theory, in all its forms, casts these problems into a different form: How
do we get knowledgeable, well-educated professional people to cooperatively obtain, share, and
act on information that will enable them to function effectively in an increasingly uncertain and
chaotic future?

The above is a rather long introduction to our basic assumption: Schools do not focus on
how to use knowledge about student development and learning because they have

¢ limited and ineffective communication systems;

© poor procedures and strategies for getting information that will help them in their core
goals;

24 National Research Center for Career and Technical Education

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Dissemination With Impact

Daft, R., & Huber, G. P. (1987). How organizations learn: A communications framework. In N.
DiTomaso & S. Bacharach (Eds.), Research in the Sociology of Organizations, (Vol. 5,
pp. 1-36). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Dahrendorf, R. (1967). Out of utopia: Toward a reorientation of sociological analysis. In R.
Dahrendorf (Ed.), Essays in the Theory of Society ( pp. 107-128). Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.

Dentler, R., Louis, K., Kell, D., Corwin, R., & Sieber, S. D. (1980). General purpose
dissemination assistance: Technical report. Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.

Frantz, N. R. (1991). Practice-oriented research or research-oriented practice. Journal of
Vocational Education Research, 16, 35-43.

Garner, C., & Raudenbush, S. (1991). Neighborhood effects of educational attainment: A
multilevel analysis. Sociology of Education, 64, 251-262.

Garrison, J. W. (1989). The role of post-positivistic philosophy of science in the renewal of
vocational education research. Journal of Vocational Education Research, 14, 39-51.

Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York:
Basic.

Harrison, T., & Debs, M. B. (1988). Conceptualizing the organizational role of technical
communicators: A systems approach. Journal of Business and Technical Communication,
2, 5-21.

Havelock, R. (1969). Planning for innovation through the dissemination and utilization of
knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, Center for
the Utilization of Scientific Research.

House, E. (1981). Three perspectives on innovation: Technological, political and cultural. In R.
Lehming & M. Kane (Eds.), Improving schools: Using what we know (pp. 17-41).
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Huberman, M. (1994). Research utilization: The state of the art. Knowledge and Policy, 7,
13-33.

Huberman, M., & Broderick, M. (1995). Research utilization: An exploration into new
territories. Unpublished manuscript, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Junge, C. B. (1986). Relationship of the USDE health occupations programs specialist to health
occupations programs throughout the nation. Journal of Health Occupations Education,
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Klobas, J., & McGill, T. (1995). Identification of technological gatekeepers in the information
technology profession. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46,
581-589.

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Weiss argues that decision accretion obviates the usual assumptions about how research
affects policy and practice. She implies that blockbuster effects from research are outside of the
norm:

It may still turn out that research leaves few ripples behind, but it is premature to
make that judgment without a long-term and close-up view of the issue arena. (p.
633)

In other words, it is only in an ideal model that research ideas are presented to practitioners
or policy makers and have a major impact. The research utilization process is “unorganized,
slow, wasteful, and sloppy” (pp. 635-636). In CTE research, Ricketts (1982) points out a
contributing factor—practitioners do not perceive a relationship between research and “real
problems.”

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Dissemination With Impact

contributed to the fragmented character of many change strategies in U.S. high schools. This is not
to fault the centers: It is federal policy that has generally promoted specialized assistance to
specific groups rather than a broader dissemination strategy that is focused on improving all
students’ performance and learning.

Summary

These brief background remarks are intended to illustrate a number of characteristics of the
emergent U.S. support system:

1. The U.S. system is deeply indebted to the.extension model developed in the agricultural
tradition.

2. Ithas traditionally focused on the dissemination side of the equation, rather than on the
knowledge use side.

3. It has become a set of uncoordinated—and even competitive—activities.

4. The resulting approach is largely top-down, research-to-practice focused, rather than
bottom-up, problem solving focused.

Smink (1985) reports findings from a series of federal dissemination studies. He indicates that
there were, at that time, many operational problems with dissemination, including

¢ Poorly identified target groups

¢ Poor content and form of information

e A reliance on one-way communication

e A limited structure for between-group sharing

« Weak incentives for use among practitioners

¢ Insufficient evaluation of the quality of information

¢ Limited local development and training.

He continues:

Most vocational education researchers will agree that most present research is higher
quality—better designed, conducted, analyzed, and reported—than that completed in the
past. ... (but) Administrators and instructors at all levels need assistance in using
research—interpreting research findings, undertaking developmental activities, and designing

and implementing research-related activities. (p. 1)

Smink also pointed out that “although promising educational practices and products are
increasingly available, relatively few have been implemented by intended users” (p. 6). Federally

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Dissemination With Impact

DISSEMINATION (AND KNOWLEDGE USE)

In the career and technical education literature, knowledge use occurs when a “decision
maker considers the findings of a study or a group of related studies for near-term resolution of a
probing problem” (Ricketts, 1982, p. 8). Use is typically defined as the application of research
results to a decision that is relevant to improving the functioning of the CTE system. It is
important to understand how disseminated knowledge is implemented (or rejected). Weiss’s
(1980, 1982) work focused on this issue. Many argued that dissemination is ineffective because
the knowledge is “not useable.” (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979). Accordingly, a great deal of
attention was paid to how disseminators should present information that is more “user friendly.”
While the effort to move beyond the research report to alternative modes of presenting results
was overdue in education (and led to major revisions in the operations of the ERIC database), it
addressed only one part of the dissemination definition discussed earlier. Louis and Dentler
(1988) argued that dissemination systems that are designed to spread information as widely as
possible (to promote awareness) may be rather different than those that are intended primarily to
encourage use:

A school improvement strategy based on dissemination and knowledge use is conditioned by
research about the circumstances under which educators at policy and practice levels will
attend to and act on new information that is made available to them from the outside. ... a
knowledge use strategy assumes that there are many positive incentives for educators to
change and improve the ways in which they do things. (p. 36)

The main elements of a knowledge use model of dissemination are:

¢ Capitalize on incentives for change—which usually, but not always, come from outside
the school in the form of pressure to change, but may also appeal to individual interests;

¢ Provide knowledge useable for practitioners—take advantage of momentum and the
typical need for relatively rapid action;

¢ Create shared understandings of how new ideas could help to improve local
practice—encourage potential users to discuss the information and how it can best be
used;

¢ Stimulate increased diffusion of new ideas within and between educational agencies—the
more that (useable) information flows back and forth regularly, the more likely it is that
new ideas from a trusted source will be attended to;

¢ Combine top-down and bottom-up approaches—dissemination does not need to be either
top-down (where the determination of what is a promising practice is made by policy or a
dissemination agency) or bottom-up (research is collected to respond to the unique needs
and situations of the school). Instead, the most effective form of dissemination combines
some of both.

Some of the findings from a study of dissemination activities among the regional educational
laboratories have significant implications for the design of dissemination systems. First,
incentives tend to be synergistic in their effects on the use of knowledge. State mandates and

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