Bridging the gap between research and practice

This article argues that the social science research community and school administrators and teachers have different agendas and respond to different pressures in their educational endeavors. One result of these different agendas is a serious communication gap between researchers and practitioners. As a consequence, educators frequently fail to rely on social science research to inform policy and practice. A proposed solution is to create formal positions at the stare or local level whose occupants, sensitive to both audiences and their work styles, would link basic and applied research to educational policy to increase the utility of research to educators.