Objectives and purposes

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing demand for evidence-based policies and practices in education worldwide. This has led to a hierarchy of knowledge sources, with data from standardized testing and evaluations being prioritized as ‘objective’ measures, while local and contextual knowledge ranks lower (Johansson et al., 2015). School actors are expected not only to comply with policy demands but also to develop their practices according to research relevant to their profession (Penuel et al., 2017). A key challenge is that it is often assumed that access to various knowledge sources leads to its actual use. Several studies show that this is not the case as teachers rarely use research to develop their practice as research is perceived as too abstract (Joram et al., 2020). Also, expectations for rapid improvements to raise test scores put pressure on school actors’ decision-making and seem to promote knowledge sources targeted short-term solutions rather than long-term developmental work (Mausethagen et al., 2018). Sources of knowledge that are practical and closely related to teaching or school practice are more likely to be used (van Ackeren et al., 2013). Moreover, professional learning communities and networks have an important influence on teachers’ learning and school development (individual and organizational learning) (Stoll & Louis, 2007).

This paper focuses on the extent to which and how teachers' use various knowledge sources in development work, such as data from standardized testing, practical experiences, subject knowledge, pedagogy, didactics, and educational research. The analysis explores and compares teachers’ use of knowledge sources in two different development project settings. Both projects are prioritized development areas in the school program. One of the projects can be described as a typical ‘top-down’ project because it involves new policies on formative assessments and thus new expectations from school authorities to which the school must respond. The other project represents a ‘bottom-up’ project, which was initiated in the school by the principal and is now being driven forward voluntarily by teachers. The organizational context and the actors in both projects are largely the same.

The following research questions guide the analysis:

• RQ1: What kind of knowledge sources do teacher teams draw upon in development work?
• RQ2: What differences can be identified regarding knowledge sources in two different project settings (top-down vs. bottom-up project)?

Theoretical Framework

Policy enactment is used as a key analytical perspective since it helps identifying priorities and conditions for local school actors involved in school development in specific socio-institutional settings. Moreover, it emphasises how teachers in the study through creative processes interpret, translate and recontextualise relatively abstract ideas into practice (Braun et al., 2011).

The study is conducted in Switzerland and follows a qualitative design and an explorative approach. We analyze data from one school in which we observed meetings and core arenas for the two development projects over the course of one school year. After the observations, we conducted semi-structured contextualized interviews. Thus, data for this paper are field notes of the ethnographically inspired observations, transcripts from interviews with key actors identified during the observations and key documents such as school development plans and material developed by the teacher teams. The combination of these data sources will help understanding the situational contexts and the larger school context, and it allows an approach that is not based only on self-reported data. The policy enactment perspective as an analytical framework offers four contextual dimensions (external, situated, material, professional) context (Ball et al., 2012; Braun et al., 2011) which we combine with inducive categories (cf. Ragin & Amoroso, 2011). Looking at and comparing the contextual dimension of the projects provides further insights regarding opportunities and constraints regarding research use. With respect to the categorisation of knowledge sources, we used deductive categories that were identified in a literature review conducted in 2021/22 (author, 2023) and additional inductive categories from the data. For the use of research, we apply the categories from Weiss’s and Bucuvalas’ (1980) work on the use of social science research in a political context, the different facets of ‘use’ related to development goals are analysed. Different categories of ‘use’ are instrumental, conceptual and symbolic and was further developed and augmented by different authors (e.g. Penuel et al., 2017; Sjölund et al., 2022) with imposed use. In the application of these categories, it gets evident that research use is not a dualistic system, but rather represent different stages on a continuum, depending on motivation and engagement with the topic.

The study shows that teacher teams use various knowledge sources in development projects. The use of knowledge sources is often implicit as teachers integrate the various sources (i.e. student performance data, experience, research evidence, contextual information about students) in their decision-making. The comparison of the two development project settings shows that there are major differences regarding use and integration of knowledge sources. Professional development courses represent an important arena for teachers to acquire knowledge in both development projects. Teachers’ use of knowledge sources is more diverse in the bottom-up project and the use of research is manifested more directly compared to the top-down projects, e.g. teachers read research literature, try out strategies in practice, share their experiences in meetings and produce their own documentation. In contrast, they tend to search for available online tools and sources in use by other schools in the top-down project. The study generates knowledge about teachers’ use and integration of different sources and how this use vary depending on the extent to which the projects respond to concrete challenges in their daily work, in other words the perceived value and the practical relevance of the work undertaken.

Authors (2023) Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools. Routledge. Braun, A., Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Hoskins, K. (2011). Taking context seriously: Towards explaining policy enactments in the secondary school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), 585–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.601555 Johansson, K., Denvall, V., & Vedung, E. (2015). After the NPM Wave. Evidence-Based Practice and the Vanishing Client. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 19(2), Article 2. Joram, E., Gabriele, A. J., & Walton, K. (2020). What influences teachers’ “buy-in” of research? Teachers’ beliefs about the applicability of educational research to their practice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 88, 102980. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.102980 Mausethagen, S., Prøitz, T., & Skedsmo, G. (2018). Teachers’ use of knowledge sources in ‘result meetings’: Thin data and thick data use. Teachers and Teaching, 24(1), 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2017.1379986 Penuel, W. R., Briggs, D. C., Davidson, K. L., Herlihy, C., Sherer, D., Hill, H. C., Farrell, C., & Allen, A.-R. (2017). How School and District Leaders Access, Perceive, and Use Research. AERA Open, 3(2), 233285841770537. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858417705370 Ragin, C. C., & Amoroso, L. (2011). Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method (Paperback). Sage Publications, Inc. http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=bcbcd621ac801b79e7e864d8111a7277 Sjölund, S., Lindvall, J., Larsson, M., & Ryve, A. (2022). Using research to inform practice through research-practice partnerships: A systematic literature review. Review of Education, 10(1), e3337. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3337 Stoll, L., & Louis, K. S. (2007). Professional Learning Communities: Divergence, Depth and Dilemmas. Professional Learning. In Open University Press. Open University Press. van Ackeren, I., Binnewies, C., Clausen, M., Demski, D., Dormann, C., Koch, A. R., Laier, B., Preisendoerfer, P., Preuße, D., Rosenbusch, C., Schmidt, U., Stump, M., & Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O. (2013). Welche Wissensbestände nutzen Schulen im Kontext von Schulentwicklung? Theoretische Konzepte und erste Befunde des EviS-Verbundprojektes im Überblick., Paralleltitel: What kind of knowledge do schools use for school development purposes? In I. van; H. Ackeren (Ed.), Evidenzbasierte Steuerung im Bildungssystem? Befunde aus dem BMBF-SteBis-Verbund. (Fachportal Pädagogik; pp. 51–73). Waxmann. http://www.ciando.com/ebook/bid-994754 Weiss, C. H., & Bucuvalas, M. J. (1980). Social Science Research and Decision-Making. Columbia University Press.