The issue of how knowledge can be transferred between educational research and school practice has been discussed extensively in recent years. Along with the call for evidence-based practice in education (e.g., Slavin, 2002), educational researchers also turned their attention towards challenges surrounding the successful transfer of research knowledge into school practice (e.g., Coburn, 2003). To this day, questions regarding these issues remain the subject of controversial debate (e.g., Biesta, 2007; Brown & Ion, 2022; Cain, 2015). Within this discourse, transfer is conceptualized in various ways – the term appears multifaceted, and its use depends, for example, on the context in which it is applied (Gräsel, 2010). One widespread concept of transfer characterizes the process as a linear activity from research to practice (Bauer & Fischer, 2007): Researchers produce and disseminate knowledge, which is then used by practitioners – in other words, a one-way process (Torres, 2022). However, this linear model of transfer has been the subject of growing criticism in recent decades (e.g., Farley-Ripple et al., 2018), one argument being that it contributes to a research-practice gap due to a lack of interaction and mutual understanding (Torres, 2022). Instead, approaches that emphasize interaction and communication between research and practice have recently gained in importance (cf. Hartmann & Kunter, 2022). Relational or systemic models of transfer (Best & Holmes, 2010) are increasingly replacing the linear understanding, a bidirectional approach, for example, assumes that the practical relevance of research can only be generated through a joint effort of research and practice (Brühwiler & Leutwyler, 2020; Farley-Ripple et al., 2018). However, despite this assumed shift in how transfer is perceived and conceptualized within the educational research community, there are indications of a persistent linear understanding of the term, which often remains implicitly present in the research literature (Blatter & Schelle, 2022).

In the German context, evidence-based education became a central concept in major funding lines of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research at the beginning of the 21^st century (BMBF, 2007). Since then, the concept and its implications for transferring research into policy and practice have been widely debated, shifting the focus to more bidirectional and collaborative transfer approaches, while at the same time insisting on terms such as evidence-based, evidence-oriented, evidence-informed, etc., which rest on more linear assumptions (e.g., Wilkes & Stark, 2023; for an international overview: Jones, 2024). Research-practice transfer itself has also repeatedly been the explicit focus of discussion within the German-speaking research community in the past decades – e.g. in special issues of German-language journals in the field of educational science and research (Thiel & Rott, 2022) – underscoring the ongoing relevance of the issue.

The rationale for this study is based on the assumption that the way researchers use the term transfer reflects how they perceive the relationship between school practice and educational research (respectively school policy and educational research), and that this perception may have changed over the past few decades. Accordingly, we aim to investigate potential changes in how the concept of transfer is understood within German-speaking educational research (Austria, Germany, Switzerland). The paper presents the results of an automated text analysis exploring the use of the term transfer in publications from German-language journals. We focus specifically on the various contexts in which the term is used, aiming to derive assumptions about the underlying concepts of research-practice transfer. Our research questions are as follows:

1. What are the topics and conceptual relationships in which the term transfer appears?
2. How has the use of the term transfer changed over the past few decades?

In order to analyze the use of the term transfer, we collected both theoretical and empirical articles from a sample of five prominent journals in the field of German-speaking educational research. The temporal scope of our analysis spans from 2000 to 2024, resulting in a corpus of 3,226 full-text documents. In addition to scientific papers, we included document types such as editorials, reports and discussions, based on the assumption that the discourse on transfer extends beyond original research articles. Before conducting further analyses, we extracted relevant text passages containing the string “transfer” from the publications. After excluding passages, e.g., from English abstracts, figures, tables or reference lists, our final corpus consisted of 3,666 passages from 641 documents. The remaining data were then preprocessed, for example by removing stopwords (common words that carry little useful information) and tokenization. As a final step before the actual analyses, we currently extract text passages specifically referring to research-practice transfer. We employ multiple approaches to investigate conceptual relationships and their changes over time. To address the first research question, we begin by extracting all terms containing the string “transfer” from the corpus, covering the entire time span of the data set. This process allows us to list all variations and compounds of the term and determine their respective frequencies. Likewise, we identify characteristic bigrams (pairs of words frequently associated) containing transfer or its variations. We then perform topic modelling (a statistical method that identifies semantically related words in a corpus of documents) on the text corpus to uncover underlying topics related to research-practice transfer that recur throughout the data. For the second research question, we repeat these steps (analyses of term frequencies and bigrams; topic modelling), this time including the year of publication as a variable to track changes in the use of the term transfer over time.

We are currently in the research phase of data cleansing; the following preliminary analyses therefore refer to the corpus of all mentions of transfer, not limited to the context of research-practice transfer. We identified a total of 262 distinct terms containing the string “transfer” across all five journals and the entire period from 2000 to 2024. The word stem “transfer” in a non-compound form was used most frequently (38.1%) , followed by the compounds “transfer effect” (5.2%), “learning transfer” (3.7%) and “knowledge transfer” (3.6 %). The most common bigrams containing the term transfer or its variations were “near_transf” (n=48), “transf_innovation” (n=36), “far_transf” (n=32), “successful_transf” (n=30) and “knowledge transf_implementation” (n=25). These initial findings suggest that the term transfer is used in various contexts and concepts in educational research – research-practice transfer being just one of many areas of application (another being, for example, transfer of learning in the field of cognitive psychology). This broad usage necessitates the step of filtering out text passages that specifically refer to research-practice transfer before proceeding to the next stages of analysis and exploring the topic in more depth. At the conference, we will present the results of our further analyses conducted on the narrowed-down text corpus (frequency and bigram analysis, topic modelling), demonstrating how the term transfer – in the sense of research-practice transfer – is used in different contexts and how its usage has developed over time. We will reflect on these results in relation to the research methodology, specifically addressing its strengths and limitations in answering our research questions. Moreover, we will discuss what the findings reveal about educational researchers' implicit assumptions regarding research-practice transfer and explore potential implications.

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