Setting research priorities for applied cognitive sciences—What do teachers want from research?

Abstract

While research evidence has the potential to improve classroom practice, research–practice gaps continue to persist not least owing to the limited relevance of research findings for practice. A common approach in healthcare to address the research–practice gap is to form research priority setting partnerships (PSPs) in which stakeholders identify questions they would like research to answer. This paper presents the results from such a PSP in education with a focus on cognitive science research, which has received increased attention in the past few years owing to its potential to explain memory and learning processes and inform classroom practice. Over 400 questions from teachers were collected using an online survey. The final 15 research priorities highlight the need for research on a wider range of subjects, settings and phases as well as research designs that take the complexity of classrooms into consideration and aim to answer how different teaching strategies interact with each other as well as student motivation and agency at the micro- and macro-level. The role of teacher expertise vs. fidelity to original research designs should also be investigated further. Overall, this paper highlights the importance of taking teacher voice into account to ensure that new research in the field is both academically rigorous and practically relevant.