Month: April 2024

Scaling-up user-engagement in education research: drawing insights from Canada’s experience

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Bernadine Sengalrayan and Blane Harvey

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Engaging knowledge users in Canadian knowledge mobilisation research: a scoping review of research in education’.

In the ever-evolving landscape of education policy and practice, research has a critical role to play in informing planning and action. However, in many countries, the link between education research conducted by academics and the potential users of that research in schools and other educational settings is not robust. Knowledge mobilisation (KMb) approaches are seen as an important way to bridge the gap between research production and its practical application in any number of settings, including education.

To better understand if KMB practices are helping to inform educational policy and practice, we explored the changing dynamics of research producer-user connections in Canadian K-12 teaching and education policy. Here are some of the highlights from our findings.

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Learning from failure: improving behavioural health treatments through understanding mis-implementation

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Grace Hindmarch, Alex R. Dopp, Karen Chan Osilla, Lisa S. Meredith, Jennifer K. Manuel, Kirsten Becker, Lina Tarhuni, Michael Schoenbaum, Miriam Komaromy, Andrea Cassells and Katherine E. Watkins

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Mis-implementation of evidence-based behavioural health practices in primary care: lessons from randomised trials in Federally Qualified Health Centers’, part of the Special Issue: ‘Learning from Failures in Knowledge Exchange’.

“This is disappointing, but I agree we’ve done the best we can.” 

– CEO of a rural health care system

In October 2021, a rural healthcare system in the US discontinued implementation of a new program to improve access to quality care for patients with co-occurring opioid use disorder and mental health disorders. The program’s mission, fueled by passion for patients, was to help complex patients not fall through the cracks. After two years of immense effort, the system experienced ‘mis-implementation.’  Mis-implementation refers to unsuccessful efforts to implement treatments in real-world settings. Although it is a disappointing outcome, studying mis-implementation can provide insights to improve processes and make changes more successfully in the future.

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