Writing a Policy Brief Based on Your Thesis Research

Often research output created by participants does not get disseminated upon completion. While the research results are academic outputs, publications in an academic journal is not often feasible due to the peer review (high quality) standards of those journals. At the same time, due to the academic (complicated) language and length of most research, the documents can also not easily be used for other (non-academic) purposes. With this short course, we aim to support participants to use existing research results in order to write short, easy to understand policy briefs. Those briefs follow the formats as used in practice. They can be shared with (future or current) employers and serve as reading content for linked in or other social media outlets. In this course, we introduce a toolkit that includes instructional materials (instruction video’s, readings, format templates),examples of policy brief’s highlighting good/bad elements and link to repositories that disseminate research outcomes to policy makers. The toolkit will include exercises that help translate the existing research material (in master theses or research reports) stepwise into a policy brief format, aswell as exercises that encourages students to define the target-audience they write the policy brief for and exercises guiding them to create dissemination strategy for the policy brief.