Bridging Research and Practice for Effective Educational Innovations

Educational research and teaching practice need to be bridged in order to:

  1. develop a robust science of learning
  2. improve the effectiveness of educational innovations that are compatible with schools, organizations, and participants involved.

To create system-wide change, the prior knowledge of educational leaders and students needs to be elucidated. This is because new interventions which do not match leaders' prior knowledge are less likely to be implemented, or they tend to be changed to be more familiar to school leaders' prior experiences, and that the efficacy of novel educational interventions may change - potentially for the worse.

The authors note that two efforts are required to establish a cumulative scientific knowledge base about the science of learning: scaling up - going from elemental findings to more complex authentic settings - and scaling down - that is going from more complex ecologically valid levels to those elemental levels that contribute to it.

To scale up from research to real-world instructional design, an elemental approach to the study of learning is required. Scaling up requires interactions among teachers, providers (such as researchers), education leaders, and organizations at the school, district, and state levels. It is subject to local contingencies of the settings within which the innovations are to be situated. Supporting teachers to implement and sustain intended instructional practices requires system-wide change, including working…

It is also important to scale down from the policy, curriculum, and instructional levels of design and analysis to more elemental research that can advance understanding of the intervention's impact while also contextualizing the more basic research. By applying a time scale framework to generate targeted research questions, learning and practice are studied in the settings of the organizational system (such as districts and schools), places of professional practice (such as a field, shop floor, or office), learning environments (such as a classroom, workplace, or multi-user gaming environment), and the individual (addressing issues such as identity, goals, and pre-existing knowledge structures).