Reflections on Connecting Research and Practice in College Access and Success Programs
Author: Rowan-Kenyon, Heather T., Ed.
Date: 2018-00-00
Type: Collected Works - General
Subjects: Access to Education,College Students,Low Income Students,Disabilities,College Programs,Federal Programs,Educational Opportunities,Information Utilization,Program Improvement,Program Evaluation,Theory Practice Relationship,Educational Research,Educational Researchers,Trust (Psychology),Equal Education,Communities of Practice,Evidence Based Practice,Partnerships in Education

There are large gaps in educational access and attainment between the rich and poor in the United States. In 2016, there was a 25 percentage-point gap in college enrollment rates for high school graduates in the top and bottom family income quartiles. Reflections on Connecting Research and Practice in College Access and Success Programs is the result of a collaboration between the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education (Pell Institute). The goal of the ASHE/Pell collaboration was to address how researchers and practitioners can best work together to address their mutual goal of reducing these gaps and fostering increased opportunity for college access and success for all students and especially for low-income, first-generation students and students with disabilities that federal programs such as TRIO and GEAR UP as well as many other programs at the state and local levels are intended to serve. In particular, the authors focused on how researchers and college access and success practitioners can best work together to inform one another and promote better outcomes for students. Some of the primary questions that emerged from the working group include: (1) How do we know what works, when, in what context, and for which students? (2) How can TRIO and GEAR UP practitioners make the best use of the extensive tracking data required for performance reporting in a manner that gets beyond compliance? The data has detailed individual student records of the outcomes of the students that are served. We ask the question of how this data can be used to institutionalize using data for program improvement. (3) How do we bring together external and internal evaluators to promote internal program improvement and external program evaluation? (4) How do we build relationships and trust between researchers and practitioners? (5) What is the map of practitioner knowledge related to research and evaluation? This essay collection is comprised of contributions by researchers and practitioners based on some of the above themes. The contents of this essay collections include: (1) Improving Connections between Research and Practice (Laura Perna); (2) Connecting Practitioners and Researchers to Strengthen College Access and Success Programs (Paul Beasley); (3) Evaluation Errors: Sixteen Lessons for Researchers and Practitioners from the Mathematica Upward Bound Study (Margaret Cahalan); (4) Relationship and Trust-Building between Researchers and Practitioners: Toward Educational Equity for Under-Served Populations (Judy Marquez Kiyama); (5) Building Trust between Researchers and Practitioners through Research Collaborations (Kristan Venegas); (6) Common Ground &amp; Upward Bound: Lessons from a Cross-Institutional Collaboration (Ezekiel Kimball, Tyson Rose, Yedalis Ruiz, and Ryan Wells); (7) Researcher and Practitioner Collaboration to Advance Inquiry and Its Usage (Angela Bell, Robert Anderson Georgia Hughes-Webb, and Adam S. Green); (8) Designing Program Outcomes with an Eye towards Program Improvement (Christopher M. Mullin); (9) Creating and Sharing Knowledge through Communities of Practice (Oscar Felix); (10) Under the Pressure to Replicate &quot;Evidence-Based&quot; Intervention, TRIO Programs should Build their Logics of Evidence Use (Mika Yamashita); (11) TRIO, the What Works Clearinghouse, and the Competitive Preference Priorities(CPPs): An Imposed Structured Practitioner-Research Collaboration (Margaret Cahalan); (12) Results of the ASHE-Pell Collaboration's Exploratory Landscape Survey (Mika Yamashita); and (13) Conclusion (Heather T. Rowan-Kenyon, Mika Yamashita, and Margaret Cahalan).