jodischneider.com/blog

What policymakers need are things that we [researchers] don’t value so much. Meta-analyses. What do we know about a given topic. If we survey 1000 papers on a given topic, what does the preponderance of the evidence say about a thing? Obviously the incentive structures in academia are about smaller mechanisms, or about making those smaller distinctions in the body of knowledge and that’s how knowledge advances and research advances, but for the policymaking space, you need to be able to translate that, like hundreds of years, half a century, decades of what we know about education, about inequality, about the STEM fields, about the research ecosystem, into that.

Alondra Nelson, discussion after the 2023 Sage-CASBS Award Lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, November 16, 2023 [video]