Making Classroom Implementation an Integral Part of Research

Abstract

In our May editorial (Cai et al., 2017), we argued that a promising way of closing the gap between research and practice is for researchers to develop and test sequences of learning opportunities, at a grain size useful to teachers, that help students move toward well-defined learning goals. We wish to take this argument one step further. If researchers choose to focus on learning opportunities as a way to produce usable knowledge for teachers, we argue that they could increase their impact on practice even further by integrating the implementation of these learning opportunities into their research. That is, researchers who aim to impact practice by studying the specification of learning goals and productively aligned learning opportunities could add significant practical value by including implementation as an integral part of their work.