Repackaging findings in an accessible way for practitioners to understand may be a good first step towards research impact, but without practitioner involvement from the outset, the research may still be deemed irrelevant. In this commentary originally published on the London School of Economics and Political Science's Impact Blog, Julie Kochanek looks at how education researchers have formed partnerships with practitioners to negotiate the research agenda itself.

Each year when Medicare’s Trustees report comes out, as it will soon, pundits and politicians fixate on the projection of when Medicare funding will be eclipsed by Medicare spending. But, Marilyn Moon asks, don’t we also need to know who pays for Medicare? What the taxpayer burden is and how much program participants pay? Whether we can afford Medicare as the U.S. population ages?

This month, a California appeals court overturned a judge’s decision that challenged the state's tenure laws, teacher dismissal practices, and the widespread practice of “last in, first out” layoffs. But, the authors of this commentary contend, research shows that for the sake of students, principals and school leaders require flexibility to make many staffing decisions on their own.

Eboni Howard shares what’s known—and isn’t—about early childhood programs and asks legislators to invest in research-based paths to greater equality of opportunity for the children who will become America’s labor force, citizenry, and leaders.

In this commentary (part of our longform essay, Applying Social Science in the Real World), George Rebok discusses whether the results of cognitive stimulation and training transfer to both laboratory and real-life tasks.

In this commentary (part of our longform essay, Applying Social Science in the Real World), Terry Salinger discusses the inherent messiness of evaluation research and how to address them.

In this commentary (part of our longform essay, Applying Social Science in the Real World), George Bohrnstedt discusses what NAEP is telling us about achievement differences between Black and White students over time.

In this commentary (part of our longform essay, Applying Social Science in the Real World), Bea Birman asks why simply identifying effective practices in education hasn’t yielded widespread or system-wide improvement outcomes.

In this commentary (part of our longform essay, Applying Social Science in the Real World), Steven Garfinkel contends that fidelity has become a challenging concept, particularly in evaluating health care insurance and delivery system interventions, and discusses how this can be addressed.

In this commentary (part of our longform essay, Applying Social Science in the Real World), Marilyn Moon discusses the challenge of being a health and aging researcher arises when facing those issues personally.