Airing the dirty laundry about research misuse: whose job is it to clean up?

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Lucy Rycroft-Smith

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘What might constitute research misuse in knowledge brokering and how might Ofsted’s 2021 mathematics ‘research review’ be considered as an example?‘, part of the part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: Research (Mis)use and Mis/Disinformation in and around Education.

In a new debate article in Evidence & Policy, I argue that Ofsted, the body that inspects England’s schools, engaged in what I term research-washing when it published its 2021 Mathematics Research Review. Research-washing means “the application of a thin veneer of research credibility to a product or idea that’s being sold to schools or teachers” (Enser, 2019:23), or wearing borrowed and underserved robes of academic credibility. The result can mislead teachers, skew school inspections, and corrode public trust in evidence itself.

Why this matters beyond mathematics education

We live in an age of evidence-informed everything. Governments, regulators, and inspectorates routinely invoke “the research” to justify their decisions. This is, in principle, a good thing. Research should inform practice and policy. But this only works if those summarising research do so honestly and accurately, with nuance, and, crucially, engage with and respond to the communities they serve. Knowledge brokers  (organisations and individuals who facilitate the movement of research into decisions) can wield enormous influence, and in this article, I argue that Ofsted meets the definition of a knowledge broker. Ofsted’s documents that they refer to as ‘research reviews’ are read by school leaders and teachers across England, shaping how subjects are taught and how schools are judged. Yet, there is currently no agreed standard for what good-quality and ethical knowledge brokering looks like, and no accepted definition of what it means to misuse research in this context. In this article, I propose some suggested ways in which to do this, using the Ofsted document as a case study.

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Getting behavioural science into the room: why ‘just the facts’ isn’t enough for policy

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Danny de Vries, Marijn Stok, Susan Michie, Peter Lunn, Jonas Sivelä and Marijn de Bruin

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Behavioural science policy advice-making during COVID-19: lessons from the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Finland‘.

To ensure behavioural science effectively informs policy during future crises, countries should move beyond temporary advisory setups toward a professionalised, explicitly governed infrastructure that prioritises direct dialogue between scientists and decision-makers and maintains the institutional memory of hard-won relationships.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers were told to ‘follow the science’, but that science was often focused on viruses and vaccines, without engaging with behavioural science advice as to how the virus could be managed and vaccine uptake maximised. Behavioural science is more than ‘behavioural insights’. It refers to the range of scientific disciplines that study why humans do what they do, from psychology to political science to anthropology. In public health policymaking, there remains a shortage of empirical evidence regarding the specific challenges that countries face when trying to professionalise this capacity.

We explored how four countries worked to bridge the gap between human behaviour and public health policy: the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Finland. We interviewed 21 senior stakeholders – from the scientists doing the research to the civil servants using it – and identified what makes evidence ‘actionable’ during a crisis.

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Bridging evidence and policy: the CalSPEC model for academic–legislative collaboration

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Richard L. Kravitz and Dominique Ritley

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘An academic–legislative partnership for evidence-based policy: the California State Policy Evidence Consortium (CalSPEC)’.

Researchers and policymakers need each other, but each group is constrained by its own conventions, vocabularies, and norms. Researchers value evidence that is reproducible, valid, and generalizable; policymakers prioritise research that is timely, actionable, and specific. The California State Policy Evidence Consortium (CalSPEC) was created to bridge this divide by connecting university research with real-world policymaking in the California state legislature.

There is no shortage of academic units and think tanks producing research monographs and policy briefs. CalSPEC was distinctive in two respects: it aimed to muster resources across an entire university system (specifically, the University of California’s 10-campuses and 70,000 faculty and academic researchers) to address critical problems in state policy, and it was a genuinely collaborative effort, with legislative committee staff involved in topic selection and question development from the start.

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Policy research for whom, by whom? From cash pilot to cash policy through critical participatory action research

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Mica Baum-Tuccillo, María Elena Torre and Maya Tellman

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘From pilot to policy: using critical participatory action research to build youth power and economic inclusion for young people with experience in foster care‘, part of the part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: The Role of Youth-Led Research in Policy Change.

What would it look like if young people who have survived and navigated policies arguably designed to fail them were the architects of the research meant to evaluate them? If those most impacted had the authority to produce the evidence needed to reshape these very policies?

How do we understand policy research as we experience the destruction of social supports, where meaningful change is possible, yet solutions remain bound by broken systems no single policy can resolve?

From June 2023 to June 2024, YouthNPower: Transforming Care gave $1,000 a month for one year to a representative group of 100 young people who aged out of New York City’s foster care system. Participants were disproportionately Black and Latine, and exited state custody without the family safety nets, financial cushions, or relational webs many of their peers have access to. Through accompanying critical participatory action research (CPAR) — an epistemology that centers those most affected by a research question as co-designers and co-investigators, treating knowledge production as inseparable from collective action — that documented the pilot, we found the cash had a meaningful impact: homelessness fell from 13% to nearly zero; the share living in their own apartments rose from 27% to 62%; participants reported improvements in their ability to afford food, rent, and other essentials; and 95% reported a greater sense of control over their lives.

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Politics of evidence co-production in Finnish higher education

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Joni Forsell

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-producing evidence in Finnish higher education admissions working groups’.

Decision-makers today need to draw on a variety of evidence sources and consider stakeholders’ views to solve evermore complex societal and political problems. Co-production refers to a multi-voiced policy process that brings together multiple actors and ways of knowing. Yet it can be unclear when and how co-production is honestly a collective endeavour and what political-structural factors condition it. In our Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-producing evidence in Finnish higher education admissions working groups’, we investigated these questions in the context of Finnish higher education policymaking. We found that Finland’s Ministry of Culture and Education (MEC) utilised working groups and evidence co-production as a governing tool to manage stakeholder interests. Capitalising on the experience and knowledge of the field produced evidence to help realise the government’s political goals.

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Supporting policy through research: what role for funders?

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Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Supporting policy through research funding: how UK funders can use Areas of Research Interest to bridge evidence gaps‘.

Using research to inform policy sounds straightforward, but in practice, it remains one of the biggest challenges in public policy. Despite decades of effort, there is still a persistent gap between what we know from research and what gets used in decision-making. Our recent study explores one under‑examined part of this puzzle: the role of research funders.

In the UK, ‘Areas of Research Interest’ (ARIs) have emerged as an important tool to help bridge this gap. ARIs are sets of questions produced by government departments that outline their priority evidence needs. They are designed to signal where new research and existing knowledge could support policy development.

Our research set out to understand how ARIs might be of use to research funders. Drawing on 30 interviews with funders, policymakers, academics and knowledge mobilisers, we found that ARIs are doing something important: they create a shared space for dialogue.

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How youth reference groups can help amplify research findings in public discussions and improve policymaking

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Lucas Walsh, Mark Rickinson, Blake Cutler and Joanne Gleeson

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How youth reference groups can contribute to amplify research findings to public discussions and potentially improve policy making‘, part of the part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: The Role of Youth-Led Research in Policy Change.

Where youth engagement in policymaking is often tokenistic or absent (Waite et al, 2024), this could be improved by collaborating with young people as research evidence users. 

In a previous post, we examined what it means for practitioners to use research well (Rickinson et al., 2024). The Quality Use of Research Evidence (QURE) Framework guides how research can effectively be applied in practice. High‑quality, relevant research needs to be thoughtfully integrated into professional practice through critical engagement and deliberate implementation. Quality use is best supported by individual skills, mindsets and relationships, as well as organisational leadership, culture and infrastructure to enable effective evidence use. We’ve now applied the QURE Framework to better understand what enables quality use of research evidence in Youth-led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to amplify youth voices in public discussions and policymaking. 

In YPAR, ‘youth train as researchers to study equity issues they want to influence and advocate for changes based on their findings’ (Ozer et al., 2020: 269). More an orientation than a method, ‘youth are considered experts who generate valid knowledge about the conditions they seek to change while working to shift power structures and change inequitable systems, policies, and practices’ (Ozer et al., 2020: 269). In our case study, young people disrupted typically scholar-dominated research to contribute as collaborative research evidence users.

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The crematorium of knowledge: reimagining how we change

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Mette Sønderskov, Ingjerd Thon Hagaseth and Arvind Singhal

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Enabling interactive knowledge mobilisation through the positive deviance (PD) approach for youth inclusion in Norway’.

About fifty years ago, the epidemiologist Archibald Cochrane recounted a conversation with a crematorium worker that feels hauntingly relevant today. When asked what fascinated him most about his profession, the man replied, ‘The way in which so much goes in, and so little comes out’.

In the world of evidence-informed policy, we are currently standing at the doors of a similar furnace. We invest staggering amounts of intellectual and financial capital into research, yet the practical yield remains frustratingly slim. We produce mountains of data, but very little of it translates into the lived experience of the communities it is meant to serve. The ‘knowledge-to-action’ gap isn’t just a crack in the pavement; it’s a canyon.

The traditional solution to this problem has been a ‘transfer model’. Experts generate knowledge in a controlled environment and then ‘export’ it to policymakers. When the evidence  fails to take root in policy and practice, the diagnosis is almost always a lack of effective dissemination or a need for ‘stricter’ implementation. But this linear logic ignores a fundamental truth: knowledge is not a package to be delivered; it is a relationship to be cultivated.

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Policy impacts through local intergenerational collectives

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Asherah Adler-Eldridge, Dane Stickney and Milahd Makooi

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Drive for equity: the impact of youth-generated evidence on transportation policy’, part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: The Role of Youth-Led Research in Policy Change.

On a policy level, life has been hard lately. Certainly, in the United States, we understand that the current administrations’ policy decisions, which have been implemented quickly, harshly and without public comment, have left people shocked and demoralised. Unfortunately, the persistent absurdity produced by sporadic policy decisions has led to widespread desensitisation, creating a sense that defeat is both inevitable and enduring.

We also think that’s the point. At times, governmental officials use the policy process to isolate, intimidate and punish people, encouraging them to withdraw from civic life. There is hope, however, and we find it on deeply local and personal levels by addressing community inequities through intergenerational collectives.

Our Evidence & Policy article, ‘Drive for equity: the impact of youth-generated evidence on transportation policy’, explains how adult educators and teenage students came together to critique, research and reform policies that oversee streets, buses and trains in Denver, Colorado. Our article describes two cases that leveraged youth participatory action research (YPAR), which is framework in which young people lead as researchers, analysts and policy developers.

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Politics of neutrality: intermediaries and research use in civics programming

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Mariah Kornbluh

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Politics of neutrality: intermediaries and research use in civics programming‘, part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: Research (Mis)use and Mis/Disinformation in and around Education.

Public education has become a political environment fraught with misinformation in the United States.  Book bans, educational gag orders and outright educator censorship influence (sometimes heavily) local school district policy. International efforts have highlighted that civics education offers a unique avenue in educating for a ‘just’ democracy. However, global trends and mounting national pressure highlights the curriculum’s vulnerability to being censored, constricted and outright distorted.

The problem: ‘neutrality’ perpetuating research misuse within civics education

Engaging in discourse on social issues and events that are relevant to students’ lives is an incredibly valuable method for them to gain needed civics skills. Yet, educators operate in an oppressive policy context that dissuades such practices and politicises historic events. Civics education has historically promoted neutrality as a pedagogical good which often manifests in a ‘both-sideism’ framework. This framework prioritises presenting ‘both sides’ of a social issue, often to the detriment of accuracy. Such an approach has been critiqued when 1) specific issues have overwhelming scientific evidence (i.e., climate change), but are presented as ‘open questions’, contributing to misinformation, and 2) such a format can set the stage for false equivalences in discourse around social injustice. Thus, the quest for ‘neutrality’ is a contested pedagogical approach within civics education, yet it has not been explored through the lens of research misuse.

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