Engaging with the research-to-practice challenge

As practitioner-researchers working in real-world settings, we need to ensure that the studies we carry out in schools are sufficiently well-designed for there to be clear conclusions and implications for practice. As well as being a methodological issue, this is also an ethical one in that we should not be taking up participants’ time for studies that, because of their design, cannot make a difference. We know that teachers’ and parents’ time is valuable, and it is worth reminding ourselves that children’s time is valuable too