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Evidence-based practice is an essential component of special education and provides a framework for promoting the use of research to inform policy and practice. Despite the importance of evidence-based practice to special education, the research-to-practice gap remains a persistent challenge to the successful dissemination of effective, research-based practices. Given the underuse of research in special education, the next big thing in evidence-based special education is to develop effective mechanisms for disseminating research and practice. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to introduce research utilization as a concept to special education and present a preliminary analysis on special education teacher perceptions of research. Results suggest that special education teachers value evidence-based practice but remain unsure of their skills to distinguish between studies with more and less rigorous methods. Moreover, we found that special education teachers tended to use sources with lower self-reported ratings of trustworthiness, such as social media and teacher exchange websites, due to time efficiency and accessibility. Respondents provided recommendations for ameliorating the research-to-practice gap and increasing the usability of research overall.

There is an identified need in higher education research for methods which have the capacity to generate conceptual insights grounded in concrete local practice but with wider applicability in understanding and facilitating research-based change. This chapter outlines an intermediate approach to qualitative data analysis which can support theoretical knowledge advancement from practice-based research, which I call the difference-within-similarity approach. It involves a particular way of conducting dialogues with our data: of interanimating similarities and differences within our qualitative datasets. The approach outlined involves first identifying a similarity, then systematically examining differences within that similarity to generate theoretical explanations. Drawing on sociocultural theorising, particularly dialogic theory and cultural–historical activity theory, the approach is based on the idea that new meanings arise from a comparison of multiple perspectives on the ‘same’ phenomenon. The tensions between such perspectives are seen as a key driver for change in educational practice. Therefore, articulating and examining such tensions in our data gives an opportunity to simulate the possibility of change in our analysis and, hence, develop insights which can inform change beyond local settings. Important here is that the differences examined are bound together by an analytically productive similarity. Through multiple research examples, the chapter identifies and illustrates a range of ways of articulating productive analytical similarities for comparison in our data: through theory/literature, through forward and backwards processing of data itself and through a process termed ‘weaving’.

This paper compares and contrasts practice-based perceptions of the research–practice gap in the United States (US) with those in Australia.

The current study extends the work of Tucker and Lowe (2014) by comparing and contrasting their Australian-based findings with evidence from a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with senior representatives of 18 US state and national professional accounting associations.

The extent to which academic research informs practice is perceived to be limited, despite the potential for academic research findings to make a significant contribution to management accounting practice. We find similarities as well as differences in the major obstacles to closer engagement in the US and Australia. This comparison, however, leads us to offer a more fundamental explanation of the divide between academic research and practice framed in terms of the relative benefits and costs of academics engaging with practice.

Rather than following conventional approaches to ‘bridging the gap’ by identifying barriers to the adoption of research, we suggest that only after academics have adequate incentives to speak to practice can barriers to a more effective diffusion of their research findings be surmounted.

This study makes three novel contributions to the “relevance literature” in management accounting. First, it adopts a distinct theoretical vantage point to organize, analyze, and interpret empirical evidence. Second, it captures practice-based views about the nature and extent of the divide between research and practice. Third, it provides a foundational assessment of the generalizability of the gap by examining perceptions of it across two different geographic contexts.

In this chapter, we examine conundrums of self-study of practice (S-SP) research that emerge from positioning this work in a space that calls for a critical rethinking of ontology and takes seriously the work of postmodernist philosophy. We explore aspects of self in relationship to the other – concerns, transformations, representations positioning, and growth – when ideas emerge in the midst of practice. We begin with an investigation of conundrums of Self in relationship to Other where both exist in continual process of BECOMING based in the work of Deleuze. We then consider the self within the research framework of S-SP methodology. As part of this examination, we consider key characteristics of this methodology in relationship to the self in practice that is the orientation to ontology and dialogue as the process of coming-to-know in this space. Next, we consider the conundrum of particularity and wholeness in the exploration of tacit and practical knowledge. We use works by Clandinin and others to probe the ways particularities and wholeness interact with tacit understandings that entangle and merge into embodied knowing. We also articulate the conundrum of the ethical for the Self and Other in S-SP Research and other forms of intimate scholarship.

A translation framework and associated processes and activities for bridging the research-to-practice gap in early childhood intervention are described. Translational processes and activities include methods and procedures for identifying evidence-based practices, translating findings from research evidence into early childhood intervention procedures, and promoting practitioners’ and parents’ routine use of the practices. The framework includes four interrelated processes and activities. Type 1 translation uses research findings to develop evidence-based practices. Type 2 translation involves the use of evidence-based professional development (implementation) practices to promote practitioners’ and parents’ use of evidence-based early childhood intervention practices. Type 3 translation includes activities to evaluate whether the use of evidence-based practices as part of routine early intervention have expected benefits and outcomes. Type 4 translation includes activities for the dissemination, diffusion, and promotion of broad-based adoption and use of evidence-based practices. Examples of each type of translation are described as are implications for practice.

In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.

In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.

This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.

This chapter argues that one of the fundamental challenges of the global character of strategy research is the growing need to foster collaborations between academic and business practitioners that can help build a better understanding of the practice of strategy and through these means deliver greater impact. This challenge strengthens existing calls for strategy research to refocus on understanding the practice of strategy with an attentiveness to micro-dynamics of strategizing, and requires us to expand the ways in which research practice is performed. Whilst this can apparently be achieved through better dialogue, building trusting relationships and valuing the contribution each party can make due to their differences, it in fact requires a questioning of our research assumptions and practice.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

The growing displacement of theory and other forms of wide-ranging knowledge of social phenomena by empirical research methods in economics is widely noted by economists and historians of economic knowledge. Less attention has been devoted, however, to understand the materialization of such changes in the scientific practices. This article studies the recent transformations in the epistemological practices at CEDE, a research center in Colombia. I use a machine learning technique called Topic Modeling, interviews to CEDE researchers, and exegesis of papers to characterize a shift in the production of knowledge in microeconometrics at CEDE during the years 2000 and 2018. I explain this shift by characterizing two sets of epistemological practices that implies a recent tendency to disdain research that cannot make a “strong” causal inference.