There has been a long debate amongst educational researchers on how to increase the practical relevance of their research. Along with the growing importance of “evidence-based” or “evidence-informed policy”, the pressure to provide usable knowledge for educational decision making has grown even more in the last several years (e.g. OECD 2007; BMBF 2008). Although many researchers and policy makers talk about relevance, the term is often only vaguely defined. While some argue that educational research has mainly an orienting function (Tippelt 1998), others – especially in the field of empirical educational research – argue that their knowledge can provide instrumental knowledge for improving educational decision making (Jäger/Prenzel 2005). The latter can be further distinguished between educational knowledge that helps to define goals, descriptive-explanatory knowledge and technological knowledge (Prenzel/Heiland 1985, 51). In the current debate, the term relevance seems to have different and often contradictory meanings. This makes it difficult to relate the different contributions to the relevance debate to each other. Against this backdrop, the present paper seeks to advance the current discussion on the practical relevance of educational research. For this purpose, the paper will classify different forms of relevance based on an analysis of a set of empirical articles published in educational top journals. The aim is to identify different forms of relevance educational researchers construct in their studies. The resulting classification will be illustrated with examples of the different forms of relevance. Finally, the results are discussed in order to find out what forms of relevance can be expected from educational research.

This project conducts an empirical investigation of how empirical educational researchers construct practical relevance in education. Based on a set of approximately 300 empirical articles in three academic top journals, a textual analysis will be conducted to analyze different forms of relevance. The analysis will follow the approach of Nicolai/Seidl (2009) who in a complementary study in management studies investigated different ways in which scientific publications are constructed as relevant. In each article, text passages in which authors address the implications and contributions of their paper will be analyzed. In a second step, these passages will be coded in several iterative steps to identify different categories of relevance. The empirically generated forms of relevance will be grouped according to the theoretically derived schema of relevance.

Developing a classification of different relevance meanings can help to reorient the current debate on the relationship between theory and practice in education, which is currently dominated by a model of instrumental relevance (Bräuer 2003). The study may help to find an answer on the question, what sort of relevance the growing body of empirical work produces and how empirical researchers construct practical relevance. What can (or cannot) be expected from empirical research? A taxonomy of different forms of relevance may help to channel different expectations from a wide range of stakeholders in education, including scientists, students, politicians and administrators. Finally, the discussion on improving the knowledge transfer between educational research and educational practice will be enriched by providing a more fine-grained picture on the possible forms of practical relevance.