This paper analyses the importance of the knowledge dissemination in the process of research use in educational policy and practice. In order to provide a comprehensive perspective, the paper reports results from a survey of Romanian education researchers regarding their experiences with research dissemination and transfer to policy makers and practitioners. In addition, interviews with academic managers and policy-makers were conducted. The survey is designed considering dissemination as an index composed of several dimensions, following an adaptation of the Research Utilisation scale (Knott & Wildavsky, 1980, and Cherney et al, 2012): importance of tailoring research; importance of meetings and dissemination; importance of presentations and reports; importance of using refereed publications; and importance of media. The survey was administered to a sample of 115 academics from 17 public universities in Romania, representing 31% of all academics in schools of education. In addition, 14 interviews with academic leaders and 13 interviews with policymakers have been conducted. The guide of interviews followed dimensions as: the role of university leaders in the institutional research dissemination, the mechanisms and structures universities possess in order to facilitate the research dissemination and the expectations users have in this process. The results reveal that research utilisation is a complex process and that stakeholders recognise that a series of factors can have considerable impacts on their efforts. Funding and other resources, tailoring research to end users, and access to and collaboration with the beneficiaries of research are critical aspects of research use. The results also show that academics and policy-makers have different perspectives on the importance of tailoring research. Whereas academics consider readability and ease of comprehension of research results to be very important to end users, policy-makers report that the language researchers use continues to be very technical and difficult to translate into policy (Landry, Amara & Lamari, 2001). In what barriers are concerned, one of the barriers to research dissemination considered in this study is the lack of interest among universities regarding the dissemination of results outside the academic context. The study findings suggest that this barrier is also reinforced by the passive role that researchers play in presenting research results, as they are more comfortable sending reports to parliamentary committees rather than meeting and holding discussions with policy-makers. The study demonstrated the need for a “strategic dialog” (Ion & Iucu, 2016) between all stakeholders in order to maximize the use of research in policymaking and practice processes.

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