Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice: What's Good, What's Bad, and How Can One Be Sure?

Mr. Davis, a professor, advises readers of this article who are practitioners not to trust everything he and his colleagues have to say about schools. Then he explains why and offers helpful tips that will allow teachers and administrators to make their own judgments about what they can profitably apply from educational research. ********** We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood --William James I TEACH at a large research university and deeply appreciate the opportunities I have to help shape the careers of aspiring school leaders and, in some ways, the institution of public education itself. As expected of professors in universities like mine, I have written quite a bit and conducted several research studies that I hope have made a reasonable contribution to my field. But I often wonder how much of what I've written has actually made a difference in the lives of school practitioners. For that matter, I wonder how much of what is thought about and produced by scholars and researchers actually affects the way administrators and teachers behave in schools. And most important of all, I wonder how practitioners learn to judge the quality of research and determine what research to pay attention to and what to ignore. These questions are crucial, especially now that the mandates of No Child Left Behind and the standards and accountability movement are pressuring American public schools to use research-based programs. Feedback from the field suggests that a gap between research and practice persists while bridges between them remain tenuous and unsteady. It appears that comparatively little of what is written and thought about by scholars and policy makers actually has any appreciable impact on classrooms or drives durable systemwide reform efforts. In their acclaimed book on school reform, Tinkering Toward Utopia, Larry Cuban and David Tyack trace the long and often confounding history of reform efforts in American public schools. (1) They argue that, despite decades of reform initiatives and millions of dollars spent in the pursuit of educational innovation, the fundamental tenets of effective educational practice have changed very little. Of course, not all reform efforts have been research-based, and not all good research is lost in the trickledown journey between the halls of academe and Ms. Doe's third-grade classroom. But enough of value is lost to raise suspicions about the relevance of the work of researchers and the vitality of the relationship between researchers and public school practitioners. For decades, public schools in America have been awash in waves of reform that have emerged from a slippery melange of empirical research studies, politically formulated mandates, and locally derived best-practice initiatives. Most have been well intentioned, many have been misguided, and some have come to schools without careful regard for hard evidence or with distorted claims of causality. Unfortunately, some of what has made it into Ms. Doe's classroom may not represent the best research, nor has it necessarily been applied with fidelity to the scientifically supportable findings from which it was derived. A close look at how research findings relating to such topics as heterogeneous classrooms, mainstreaming of special-needs students, social promotion, bilingual education, and instructional methods are actually applied in public school classrooms reveals numerous variations based on local policies and politics, management philosophies, school culture, student characteristics, levels of teachers' skill, and available resources. But today, now that public schools have entered an era of high-stakes accountability and standards-based instruction in which decisions about educational programs and activities are expected to be closely aligned with empirical research and evidentiary data, it can be argued that scholars and practitioners must redouble their efforts to bridge the gap between theory and practice. …