This paper introduces Community and Participatory Evidence and Research Synthesis (CAPERS), a prospective mixed-methods framework that intentionally engages community partners to improve the relevance, usability, and implementation readiness of research syntheses in educational psychology. CAPERS provides a structured yet flexible approach for integrating community-based participatory methods into evidence synthesis at multiple points in the research process and at varying levels of depth, depending on the research, practice, and policy goals of the synthesis. Foundational to CAPERS is the purposeful integration of participatory and synthesis methods to support intentional, transparent, community-aligned decision making. By shifting community engagement from a post hoc interpretive activity/responsibility to a prospectively planned component of the research synthesis design, CAPERS addresses longstanding limitations of researcher-driven synthesis methods, facilitates earlier attention to community perspectives and implementation factors, and enhances equity by changing how evidence is generated, interpreted, and prioritized within research synthesis. Grounded in research synthesis methods, implementation science, and educational psychology, this paper outlines the core features of the methodological framework, its advantages, and key considerations for application across synthesis types and purposes. Educational psychology theory and research have played a foundational role in how education systems and schools can improve learning and development in children and adults. The field broadly relies on a wide range of methodologies to produce evidence that can then be translated for practitioners, policymakers, and community members to use, adapt, and refine within the context of their professional practice (Schutz Cooper et al., 2019; Cumming et al., 2023). In this paper, we articulate an applicable framework for an intentional, integrated methodological framework to enhance and advance research synthesis methods with the goals of centering research partner, participant, end-user, and community voices within the synthesis process, aligning the knowledge generation process to current problems of practice. This will increase the depth of knowledge about evidence use and implementation, embracing models of knowledge and evidence co-generation, and improve the efficiency of research so that there is direct alignment between synthesis methods and the people and parties who will rely on the evidence. Community and Participatory Evidence and Research Synthesis (CAPERS) is a novel mixed-methods synthesis framework that is particularly well suited to addressing persistent problems at the intersection of educational psychology, policy, and practice. For example, in efforts to understand variability in the effectiveness of school-based interventions, CAPERS can integrate meta-analytic findings with practitioner and student perspectives to identify contextually-grounded mechanisms of change that are not captured by or reported in published studies alone. In policy contexts, such as the implementation and compliance of special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, CAPERS can be used to synthesize policy and program evaluations alongside community member input (e.g., educators, families, and administrators) to better understand how policies are interpreted, adapted, and enacted across settings. In practice-oriented research, CAPERS can support the design and adaptation of instructional or intervention programs by combining evidence from systematic reviews with community-informed insights (e.g., through focus groups or co-design activities) to ensure that resulting practices are feasible, acceptable, and sustainable in real-world educational contexts. CAPERS, by definition, extends research synthesis beyond aggregation of findings to support more contextually aligned, actionable, and implementation-ready knowledge generation. In this paper, we provide an overview of CAPERS and how it can both deepen and broaden the impact of research syntheses and improve the alignment, precision, efficiency, and applicability of research synthesis methods in educational psychology.
Chow et al. (Wed,) studied this question.