Most people in the United States would never consider treatment from a doctor who does not keep up with current medical research.  The same people never questions the fact that teachers who never read any educational research teach their children everyday.

            Several studies reveal huge gaps between educational research and the actual practice of education (Corcoran, Fuhrman, & Belcher, 2001; Heibert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Kang, 2007; Ruthven, 2005).  In education, there is no mechanism for the efficient implementation of research.  For example, research done in the 1970’s showed that following a specific set of standards improved student achievement.  In the 1990’s, state governments actually adopted standards.

            Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003) identified five barriers in education that prevent research from impacting classroom practices.  First, no individual or group is responsible for applying research to the classroom.  Second, there are not enough resources allocated to adequately test research in the classroom.  Third, educational researchers do not have built in incentives within the culture of research to encourage collaboration – the higher the number of people that work on a project, the less credit any individual receives for the results.  Fourth, education is not a research-based industry.  Evaluations of curriculum effectiveness almost never involve performance data.  Fifth, there is no commercial data for implementing change (Burkhardt & Schoenfeld).

            The problem as stated by Hargreaves is, “educational researchers write mainly for one another in their countless academic journals, which are not to be found in a school staffroom.” (as cited in Joram, 2007). Teachers do not have access to professional journals and do not pursue access because they simply do not have the time required to weed through to the technical jargon of the vast amounts of reports on any given topic to find something that might apply to their classroom.  A study conducted by Landrum, Cook, Tankersley, and Fitzgerald examined practicing teachers’ assessments of the trustworthiness, usability, and accessibility of information from four sources: colleagues, workshops, college courses, and professional journals.  Teachers rated professional journals as the least trustworthy, and usable sources of information and only slightly more accessible than college courses.  Teaching will not truly be considered a profession until these hurdles are overcome and teachers become both effective producers and critical consumers of educational research.  As Elmore (2005) points out, teachers can not become more effective by applying knowledge and skill they already have.

Most teachers want to be better teachers, but they have limited resources to rely on in order to actually fulfill this desire. Educational research is supposed to help teachers improve their practice.  Yet it will never achieve this end if it is not made available to teachers in a context they can understand and easily apply.  Most educational research is not readily useful to most teachers because it is the product of isolated studies rather than groups of studies designed to address the complexities of actual classrooms.  Cocoran, Fuhrman, and Belcher (2001) found that even when districts encourage the use of research in decision making, school staff members pay lip service to the merits of research but value the actual experience of teachers in the classroom more.  Teachers state that research is difficult to access and even harder to interpret.  Teachers felt they were ill prepared to sort out significant discoveries from the copious data (Cocoran, et. al., 2001).  Consequently, the knowledge that guides most classroom teachers comes from years of trial and error within the education system.  As much as they might benefit from the knowledge of their colleagues, most teachers cannot access the experiences of others and must create their own pool of knowledge from scratch.  Heibert, Gallimore, and Stigler (2002) believe teachers must have a means of storing knowledge in a form that it can be accessed and used by others if it is to take on a life of its own.  This system would allow teachers to treat ideas for teaching as objects that can be shared and examined publicly.  

Ruthven (2005) argues that teacher research provides a bottom-up means of developing prototypes of good practice, and of doing so in a way which promotes deeper thinking by participating teachers, stronger commitment from them, and more far-reaching changes.  Combining the roles of teacher and researcher eliminates the problems with accessibility and contextualization of research for the teacher.  Kang (2007) confirms the productive nature of action research as professional development.  The teachers’ experiences with action research connect their knowledge with classroom actions which transforms the teaching practices they use with students (Kang).  Although most teachers claim their informal research is motivated by “professional development,” it can have the dual purpose of generating a “public knowledge base” if teachers were given a common forum to post and discuss their findings.