Data in a Brave New World: Reducing Isolation to Amplify the Impact of Educational Research on Practice

Abstract

In our November 2017 editorial (Cai et al., 2017), we presented a vision of a future in which research has a significant impact on practice. In the world we described, researchers and teachers work together, sharing similar goals and incentive structures. A critical feature of this brave new world is the existence of an online professional knowledge base comprising “useful findings and artifacts that are continuously refined over time, indexed by specific learning goals and subgoals, and that assist teachers and researchers in implementing learning opportunities in their classrooms” (p. 469). Moreover, we argued that teacher—researcher partnerships are a necessary condition for greater impact on practice.