It is not always easy to translate research into concrete practical recommendations for teachers.

This is partly owing to the fact that there’s an inherent disconnect between practitioners and academics. When you work in academia, you are driven by incentives and goals besides the day-to-day teaching of children. Although classroom practice is close to the hearts of academics in the field of education, we’re not active school practitioners anymore.

The risk here is that ideas that sound good in theory - and appear to work in empirical studies - are not actionable in classrooms.

Likewise, teachers - even those who have written whole books on education research - are not researchers. Their take on the evidence can be at risk of so-called “lethal mutations” in understanding.

There is a simple solution here: teachers and researchers need to talk more. We need to discuss such matters and work together on bringing research and practice together.

This is why I was so excited to present alongside a Dutch teacher, Per-Ivar Kloen, at a recent researchED event in Belgium. Many of our public and email conversations have perfectly illustrated how challenging it can be to translate research findings to teacher practice.

A holistic picture

In our talk, Kloen and I put forward the idea that we should treat education research more like we would treat medical research. If your doctor prescribes you a certain drug, it will come with information on how that drug works, what the active ingredients are and what possible side effects you might expect. The prescription will tell you how much to take, how often and for how long.

In medicine, a possible intervention is presented as a holistic picture: the good, the bad and the ugly. Education research needs to come with a similar level of detail and a similar level of transparency.

The side effects should not necessarily be seen as a weakness. As education researcher Yong Zhao points out, in education, as in medicine, what works might sometimes hurt.

Kloen and I presented some examples from education research where we thought a prescription level of detail was needed. One example is encouraging pupils to draw on prior knowledge: teachers need to understand that one possible side effect of this is that learners will develop a perceptual bias towards certain types of information (we call this the Einstellung effect, which I have covered in a previous column).

Another example is retrieval practice: while we know that this can be an effective technique, we also know that the way in which recall is done matters (Endres et al, 2020). So, again, we need a prescription alongside the general recommendation.

Ultimately, the answer to the question “does it work?” is almost always “it depends”. When researchers and teachers listen to one another, we can better understand this.

Conversations between Kloen and I have been mutually useful. They have allowed me to check my understanding of research with a practitioner; Kloen was able to check his interpretation of the research with me.

Together, we have managed to get a clearer picture of how research can best inform practice - disclaimers, side effects and all.

Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies

This article originally appeared in the 19 November 2021 issue under the headline “Why research should come with a health warning”