What makes a good educational research summary? A comparative judgement study of mathematics teachers' and mathematics education researchers' views

Abstract

The field of knowledge brokering in educationaiming to better connect research to practice-is currently emerging. Evidence of a community dissonance between researchers and practitioners in education suggests that models of knowledge brokering that consider the perspectives and priorities of both groups are required. It is also a priority to identify what kinds of knowledge brokering products such as research summaries are successful at communicating research to teachers, potentially functioning as boundary objects. We report findings from a comparative judgement study where a group of 28 mathematics teachers and a group of 19 mathematics education researchers ranked twenty research summaries, from different sources, in terms of their success at communicating the research to teachers, and explained which features contributed to this ranking. Overall the findings suggest moderate consensus both within and between the two groups, and some important areas of difference. Both groups agreed that graphic design was the most important

Conversations reflecting boundary-objects-related details of a teacher’s local practices with spreadsheet algebra programs on variables

“…UMEs on ways to enhance their role as knowledge brokers, that is, interlocutors, between research knowledge on variables and ways teachers converse about variables (Rycroft-Smith & Stylianides, 2022). Of particular interest was how teachers converse about the design of the two SAPs, which breaks boundaries by representing learning trajectories that connect factors, products, trinomials and ways of interpreting the discriminant through an expansive view of variables and parameters (Confrey & Maloney, 2014;Epp, 2012;Göbel, 2021).…”

Special issue: Evidence into policy and practice

“…Rycroft‐Smith and Stylianides (2022) showed 20 different summaries of studies to teachers and researchers. They generally agreed that the key features of a good summary were good graphic design, being well‐structured, and easy to read.…”