Scholars Aim to Connect Studies to Schools' Needs
Education researchers are wondering if the work they do is making enough of a difference in real schools and districts. In national commissions, networks, and discussion groups, they are increasingly asking whether it can be made more usable.
A scholarly study, for instance, may be fine for publishing in a journal, but chances are few teachers or principals will ever use it for guidance. And while research might document a successful innovation that works in one school, the same practice is often hard to transplant to another.
"One of the big problems in educational research is that people haven't understood the need to take research one step further and translate it to usable knowledge," said Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, the dean of Harvard University's graduate school of education. "Medicine has for a while had something called 'translational knowledge,' and that's what we need...
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