Solving Problems of Practice in Education A Prescriptive Model for the Use of Scientific Information

The authors identify and discuss the many complexities involved in the translation of scientific information in the social sciences into forms usable for solving problems of practice in education. As a means of appropriately handling these complexities and the issues that arise, they prescribe a series of stages to be followed from the advent of a practitioner’s situational problem to the design of a response to it. They assert that unless the process of translation is conducted with the prescribed level of understanding, appre-ciation, and rigor, the application of knowledge will be inaccurate. This article is the outgrowth of a project that began initially as our shared concern, which is illustrated in the following two examples: Two adult educators were discussing how they worked with anxious students in their classes. Both were familiar with and made use of a particular set of studies on anxiety, but each had developed different solutions that revealed fundamental conflicts in their application of the basic informa-tion. The conflict was not due to reading the primary source incorrectly but to making assumptions about the findings that would be in harmony with their own approach to teaching. The second example involves two adult educators arguing about the role of anxiety in learning. One educator was rejecting any benefits the presence of anxiety could have on learning while the other educator was proposing the opposite position-that anxiety could be of benefit in learning. It was apparen