Despite decades of research related to teaching and learning, the findings have made little impact on classroom teaching and learning. This paper briefly describes the four existing methods to close this gap, with more extensive analyses of the limitations of one of the four methods, which is to consolidate and distill robust laboratory findings…

Given the rapid growth of research-practices partnerships (RPPs), we need a framework that helps the field understand how RPPs can facilitate mutual learning for those involved. Drawing on both cultural-historical and organizational learning theories, we argue that learning can happen in RPPs for both researchers and practitioners at the…

Given the rapid growth of research-practice partnerships (RPPs), we need a framework that helps the field understand how RPPs can facilitate organizational learning in service of local educational improvement and transformation. Drawing on sociocultural and organizational learning theories, we argue that learning can happen for the organizations…

This research-practice partnership (RPP) focused on developing and testing metrics and tools to foster improved evidence-based budgetary decision-making. The expectation was that research findings would directly influence decisions about program expansion, contraction, or elimination. Instead, unexpected findings led to unexpected uses: changes in…

Even when innovations have rigorous evidence of impact, they often are not widely adopted by the field, or their use is not sustained. To support more successful transitions of educational research to the field, SRI researchers modified its Invent-Apply-Transition (I-A-T) framework that has been successfully used to scale research to practice in…

Can the science of reading contribute to improving educational practices, allowing more students to become skilled readers? Much has been learned about the behavioral and brain bases of reading, how students learn to read, and factors that contribute to low literacy. The potential to use research findings to improve literacy outcomes is…

In this article, Rachel Abenavoli, Natalia Rojas, Rebecca Unterman, Elise Cappella, Josh Wallack, and Pamela Morris argue that research-practice partnerships make it possible to rigorously study relevant policy questions in ways that would otherwise be infeasible. Randomized controlled trials of small-scale programs have shown us that early…

Interest in the study of scale has grown over the past three decades, yet it still suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. Despite attempts at conceptualizing scale, there is still wide diversity in how the term "scale" is used. These differences matter. They impact how scale is studied, the strategies used to achieve scale, and the…

Over 60 years of research reveal that informants who observe youth in clinically relevant contexts (e.g., home, school)--typically parents, teachers, and youth clients themselves--often hold discrepant views about that client's needs for mental health services (i.e., "informant discrepancies"). The last 10 years of research reveal that…

We argue in this paper that there is currently no adequate theoretical framework or model that spans the twelve odd year trajectory from non-reader to proficient reader, nor addresses fine-grain skill acquisition, mastery and integration. The target construct itself, reading proficiency, as often operationalized as an endpoint of formal secondary…

We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special…

There is considerable need for adoptable evidence-based interventions for implementation in public classrooms serving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) during the preschool years, an important period in neurodevelopment. Barriers to implementation, including gaps in teacher education, contribute to the research-to-practice gap, and may…

A persistent challenge for teacher professional development is how to best support the translation of knowledge into practice. Building on scholarship that characterizes teacher learning as both a cognitive and situated process, we examine one district's effort to enact a model classroom approach to professional development. Based on qualitative…

Background: Spatial thinking skills are strongly correlated with achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields and emerging research suggests that interventions aimed at building students' skills will likely yield measurable impacts on learning across K-12 settings. The importance of spatial thinking in science has…

There is growing concern among researchers and governmental officials that knowing what works in education is important, but not enough for school improvement. Sound evidence alone is not sufficient for large-scale, sustainable change, both because practitioners may consider it irrelevant to their own problems of practice or run into challenges…