The purpose of this study was to identify and determine attributes of vehicles which will bridge the communication gap between researchers and policymakers at the California State Legislature. The key policy actors, defined as those individuals who have the most effect on creation and content of educational policy in the area of education at the California State Legislature, were seen as operating in an atmosphere ideological in nature due to the absence of research data within the policy debate structure, and the effects of political pragmatics. The entire population of the Legislature, including the education committees consultants, were surveyed in order to obtain quantitative data. Qualitative data was generated by the use of selected interviews by the researcher as well as an open-ended survey question. A synthesis of the two methods of data collected generated the findings and recommendations. The findings of the study were that educational research should be presented in a very concise format with clearly marked headings and focused arguments as the rationale underlying the format. The information should be disseminated early and often to both houses' offices of research and educational committee consultants. Delivery of information just prior to votes on the legislation would be most effective. Financial reform in the area of school funding as well as restructuring were seen as the two most important issues research should be focused on currently. Recommendations for future study would be collection of data from the Assembly and Senate offices of research in order to determine the format and delivery of educational research most useful to these entities. Based upon the results, the research community should be surveyed to ascertain the best means for researchers and other educational professionals to link up with end users of research at the policy level. The same effort to determine most useful format and delivery should be conducted for the press since we saw in the results of currently used information that newspapers were ranked quite highly by the Legislature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pacific.edu/oai:scholarlycommons.pacific.edu:uop_etds-3843 |
| Date | 01 January 1993 |
| Creators | Walker, David Michael |
| Publisher | Scholarly Commons |
| Source Sets | University of the Pacific |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations |
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