How State and Local Education Leaders Can Make Research Participation Work for Them
TLDR: Districts and states are recruited into research constantly, but less is written about the other side of that dynamic: the leaders deciding whether, and under what conditions, to say yes. Research participation is often most productive when a district or state has thought about what kind of evidence they need, what they can realistically commit to, and what they expect to get back.
There's a well-developed literature on how researchers recruit participants, including guidance on how to write participant consent forms in accessible language, how to structure incentives, and how to improve response rates. Much less of that same attention guides district or state education leaders in deciding whether a study is worth investing time and effort.
Districts and states are not passive subjects waiting to be studied. Instead, they can “recruit” research opportunities that work for them. Doing so comes down to three key decision points: what evidence will help improve student experiences and outcomes, what kind of participation can the district or state realistically commit to, and what do they expect to get back.
Decide What Evidence You Actually Need
Before agreeing to participate in anything, get clear on what kinds of questions your district or state most needs answers to.
“How Do We…” Questions
How do we… …accelerate learning for students who are behind, …reduce disciplinary referrals, …reduce chronic absenteeism? These how-to questions can be addressed in a number of ways, depending on the level of involvement a district or state can commit to. This ranges, for example, from a written research report summarizing the best available evidence on how to achieve a specific aim to participation in a large experimental study. It can also include participation in a continuous improvement study, where researchers work with district staff over time to implement evidence-backed strategies and iteratively study how student outcomes change as implementation is refined.
“What's Happening Here” Questions
There are many instances in which district and state leaders must first understand what is currently true. Do families across the state have real access to quality early childhood programming? Are apprenticeship and work-based learning business partners sufficiently proximal to the schools they're supposed to serve? What is the current implementation status of a practice, policy, or product you rolled out — not what you assume is happening but what is actually happening?
These are descriptive questions, and they're usually answered well through some combination of district administrative data, surveys of students, teachers, and leaders, interviews or focus groups, and direct observation.
“Does It Work” Questions
This is the question I run into most often when talking with state and district leaders, and it makes sense. No leader or educator would want to knowingly use an approach that doesn’t work. I have recruited for and run randomized controlled trials with schools, and I have seen how powerful the evidence they produce can be when done at the right time and done well. At the same time, the “does X work?” question can be risky for states and districts to pursue if they are not yet ready. There are at least two things to sort out before agreeing to or seeking out an impact study.
First: what kind of study is actually feasible given your circumstances and your preferences? Is random assignment, whether of students, teachers, classrooms, or schools, something your staff, families, and school board can commit to? If not, what kinds of information sharing and buy-in building activities would need to happen first?
Second, and more often skipped: is the current state of implementation mature enough to bear an impact evaluation? If a practice or policy isn't yet running the way it's supposed to, an impact study can return null or negative results that reflect the immaturity of the rollout, not the value of the policy or practice.
When that's the case, other kinds of evaluation — implementation studies, formative evaluation, continuous improvement work — may be more useful. They also build the kind of evidence-use culture that makes a future impact study worth running.
Decide What Kind of Participation You Can Actually Commit To
The right research question doesn't guarantee an effective research relationship. Before agreeing to anything, be honest with yourself and the research team about what your district or state can realistically do. Research built around commitments you can't keep is worse than no research at all.
Data Sharing and Research Approval
Are you willing to help shepherd a data sharing agreement between your district and the research team, and to walk the study through your district's research approval process, if one exists? These steps sound administrative, but they're often where study participation can stall out entirely. Without someone on staff actively monitoring and pushing the process forward, the time these steps can take often become the real obstacle because, whether due to funder requirements or the nature of the school calendar, studies often have a “must start by” date.
Participant Consent
When research participants are under 18, agreement from the student isn't enough; in most cases a parent or guardian also must provide active consent, typically by returning a signed consent form. Many studies depend on hitting a minimum number of participants for the results to provide meaningful evidence, and the active consent requirement is where sample size is most prone to falling apart.
School and district staff are the ones who can best help solve this. They know which families respond to which kind of outreach, and they can work with researchers to figure out how to get the greatest possible number of consent forms back. Before committing to a study, ask honestly whether your school leaders and teachers, in other words the people who'll actually be doing this legwork, can commit the time it takes.
Participant Compensation
Researchers often want to compensate participants for their time, as they know that research participation takes time and effort. Plenty of districts have policies that forbid this, however. If that's true for you, be clear about this early on, and be willing to talk through alternatives. Compensating a classroom or a school, rather than an individual student or teacher, is often a workable middle ground, but only if it's on the table from the start.
Funding Arrangements
Who pays changes who has authority. When a state or district funds its own research, it keeps more control over the specifics. When the money comes from outside — a foundation, a government agency, a vendor — that funder's requirements come with it. Understand those requirements before you agree to anything, not after.
Decide What You Expect From the Relationship
The last decision is the one districts skip most often, and it's the one that determines whether a research partnership feels worth it in hindsight.
One-Time Transaction or Long-Term Partnership?
Some research relationships are meant to answer one question and then end. Others are the start of an ongoing partnership that will keep producing useful evidence for years. Neither is wrong, but know which one you want and which you're entering, as it changes how much relationship-building is worth investing now.
Who Gets the Findings, and How
Decide up front whether findings will be provided to district leaders only or to educators too (the people most often doing the work the study was about). Researchers are often willing to give a customized district or school presentation of what they found and what it suggests for practice. That conversation is usually worth more than a written report that sits unread. Ask for it.
Benefits for Whom?
Be clear-eyed about who the research can benefit and in what timeframe. Some studies are designed to benefit the specific students and teachers involved, right now. Others are designed to benefit students and teachers broadly, in the future. Both are legitimate reasons to participate; after all, the districts that participated in research years ago helped produce the evidence-backed practices and curricula you use today. But don’t let this surprise you after the fact.
Ultimately, treat the process of seeking out a research partner or responding to a research invitation the way you'd treat any other partnership proposal: know what you need, know what you can deliver, and know what you expect back before you say yes. Districts and states that get this right don't just end up with better studies, they end up with research partners they want to, and often do, work with again.