William Penuel – 8 March 2024 – Organizing Research for Relevance

Are you interested in how to organize research for relevance? Then please join us for an interactive talk by William R. Penuel, distinguished Professor of learning sciences and human development on Friday 8 March from 9.30-10:45 in the Academy Hall – Belle van Zuylenzaal, Utrecht.

Organizing Research for Relevance

Calls for research to be more relevant to practice persist, despite extensive efforts in the past two decades to produce research that can better inform decision making. This is so, because most research efforts remain unresponsive to the concerns of decision makers and educators and fail to anticipate the plural goals and contexts where research will be taken up. In this talk, I will name five heuristics for organizing research and development for relevance and impact, illustrating those heuristics within a large-scale effort to develop and test free, standards-aligned instructional materials in high school science. These heuristics are: (1) be adaptive while also attending to history; (2) anchor design activities in a vision for equitable disciplinary teaching and learning; (3) maintain continuous attunement to interest holders’ interests and concerns; (4) design for productive adaptation that anticipates pluralities and discontinuities; and (5) develop evidence related to multiple potential future uses of the products and findings from the research and development effort.

William R. Penuel is Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development in the Institute of Cognitive Science and School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder.

He designs and studies curriculum materials, assessments, and professional learning for teachers in STEM education, primarily in science. He also studies how contemplative practices and critical inquiry can support educators in cultivating more compassionate learning environments and schools.A third line of his research focuses on how long-term research-practice partnerships can be organized to address systemic inequities in education systems linked to race, gender and sexual diversity, and language. His research employs a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods, including an approach his colleagues and he have developed called design-based implementation research (http://learndbir.org). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and International Society of the Learning Sciences.

The Youth Education and Life Skills community is proud to facilitate this interactive talk in collaboration with the department of Education and looks forward to seeing you.

You can sign up by using this registration form. See you then!