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Research and Practice: A Complex Relationship?

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Quality Research in Literacy and Science Education

The past decade has seen fundamental questions about the nature and quality of educational research, and its relationship to practice and policy, placed prominently on the agenda in many countries. In the United Kingdom, the 1996 Teacher Training Agency lecture by David Hargreaves, then of the University of Cambridge, is widely seen as having played a key role in setting the agenda and influencing the direction of the ensuing debate. In his lecture, Hargreaves (1996) asked if teaching could be regarded as a research-based profession and concluded that it could not. This he attributed largely to the nature and quality of the outcomes of educational research: “Given the huge amounts of educational research conducted over the past fifty years or more, there are few areas which have yielded a corpus of research evidence regarded as scientifically sound and as a worthwhile resource to guide professional action” (p. 2).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Studies, University of York, UK

    Robin Millar

  2. School of Education, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Jonathan Osborne

Authors
  1. Robin Millar
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  2. Jonathan Osborne
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Correspondence to Robin Millar or Jonathan Osborne .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Iowa State University, USA

    Mack C. Shelley II

  2. University of Victoria, Canada

    Larry D. Yore

  3. University of Iowa, USA

    Brian Hand

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Millar, R., Osborne, J. (2009). Research and Practice: A Complex Relationship?. In: Shelley, M.C., Yore, L.D., Hand, B. (eds) Quality Research in Literacy and Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8427-0_3

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