Ricerca pedagogica fra pratica educativa e policy making: il ruolo della comunicazione

The paper focuses on a long-lasting issue: the relationship between educational research and policymaking or practice. Demonstrations of failure in this relationship occurred frequently over the past century, and often lead to attempts to improve the situation. Why educational research into practice and policy making doesn't work? Our aim in this paper is to contribute to a deeper analysis of the relationship between research and policymaking or practice, particularly as regards the role on communication research. We think that the unsuccessful interaction among research, policymaking and practice can be read as a "communicative defect". From the research point of view, we have planned an explorative study, which represents a start up point, based on the analysis of the methodological books aimed to present the research process in university education courses; we intend to analyze the importance and the contents related to the theme of communication in these publications. Thanks to this analysis we have put in evidence a general lack and the prevalence of a technical and instrumental point of view; when the content is developed, it’s carried out as lists of indications and examples in order to write research report, research articles and/or present data with graphics and tables. In this paper we want to demonstrate that researchers must first recognize the role of communicating research as a strategic element of the whole process; we want also underline that it is necessary to pay more attention to the education level in order to develop this competence as a part of the general "research competence".