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K-20 Partnerships: Recommendations for Research

June 9, 2008

Federal programs including the National Science Foundation’s Math and Science Partnership program promote partnerships between K–12 school districts and higher education institutions. These K–20 partnerships aim to improve alignment and cooperation among participating institutions and to better pool resources to address persistent problems associated with poor student performance. In an examination of 36 research articles, Matthew Clifford and Susan B. Millar conclude that the K–20 partnership literature lacks methodological rigor and scope, that partnership is almost always inadequately defined, and that the research about how K–20 partnerships form and function and what they achieve contains significant gaps. Despite these weaknesses, there’s one big strength: Multiple, independent qualitative researchers working with a grounded approach and in different contexts arrived at similar conclusions about factors associated with the success and failure of partnerships. More information is available here.