"This book is a frank account of, and a valuable reflection on, what happens when researchers work with policy makers in lesser developed countries to inform policy changes....It would be a useful reader in graduate courses in policy analysis and research and a helpful reference to practitioners and scholars engaged in education reform around the world."

--Maris O'Rourke, Senior Education Advisor, The World Bank

"Explores the link between reseasrch and policy change by providing frameworks for understanding and managing the difficlut tasks of turning research into dialogue and dialogue into meaningful policy change. It is valuable reading for those who operate at the nexus of research and practice."
Merilee Grindle

--Edward Mason Professor in International Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

"This book is, above all, an eye opener in terms of its frankness in criticizing why research very often fails to inform policy implementation, and why policy makers, more often than not, choose to ignore policy recommendations based on the scholarship of discovery and synthesis. Reimers and McGinn have given us a book that is useful as a description of what works and what doesn't in international development assistance projects."

--Carlos Alberto Torres, President, Comparative and International Education Society

Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Web Site, March, 2000

This book explains how decisions about education and educational policymaking can be informed by research-based knowledge. The authors develop a framework to organize three approaches to informing education policies with research-based knowledge. These approaches are policy dialogue as persuasion, policy dialogue as negotiation, and policy dialogue as participation and organizational learning. In addition, they develop a nine-stage model for how best to permit research to influence this type of organizational learning. A current review of literature in research vitalization in education is also discussed.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Concepts and Issues
Research Utilization: Why It's Important, Why It's an Issue, Why It's Difficult
What Do We Mean by Informed Policymaking?
Why Education Policies Are So Difficult to Inform
Approaches to Informing Policy for Education
Utilization as Using Pre-Cooked Conclusions
Utilization Stimulated by Providing Decision Makers with Data
Informing Policy by Constructing Knowledge
Case Studies of Use of Information in Policymaking
Namicia: Consultation for Change, the Etosha Conference
Conducting an Education Sector Assessment in Egypt
Conducting an Education Policy Survey in Honduras
Conducting an Education Policy Survey in Colombia
Conducting a Participatory Sector Assessment in El Salvador
Policy Dialogue as Organizational Learning in Paraguay
Fitting It All Together: A Model to Inform Policy with Research-Based Knowledge


Bibliography
Index