For many years, researchers have bemoaned the fact that practitioners and policy makers take little notice of their findings. As Shymansky and Kyle (1992 p. 756) put it, "Why does so much effort result in such little apparent benefit?" Some time ago, addressed the research-practice gap. They pointed out that many objective, quantitative findings were not valued by teachers, who considered that most researchers did not understand life in real classrooms, and, closeted in their ivory tower, wrote research reports and journal articles which "consisted of convoluted prose and specialized terminology which takes far too much time to decode into meaningful material" (Stubbs, 1982, p. 25). Teachers had more interest in anecdotal reports, which they found more meaningful and to which they could relate more readily than traditional research methods . At about the same time, responded to what he considered unduly pessimistic criticism of the state of educational research with specific examples of how research has changed to focus more on the role of participants in teaching and learning. More recent comment about bringing the research-practice gap in science education also has focused on changing research methodologies to include teachers as collaborators or teachers as researchers .
Today, much more of the research in science education, at least, has resemblance to the "anecdotal reports" referred to by , because, as we shall see, most of the research published in mainstream science education journals in 1996 used qualitative rather than quantitative methodologies (to use a gross oversimplification of research methods). However, the gap between research and practice remains. In his 1997 address, retiring NARST President Tom Koballa quoted teachers' views that science education research was not useful to them. He, too, recommended collaboration with practitioners, but also that "we rethink how science education research is communicated to science teachers" (Koballa, 1997, p. 4) as one way to narrow the research-practice gap.
It is the communication of research results that I wish to address herein, and specifically the communication of quantitative results. We cannot simply dispense with approaches to research that provide quantitative results, because there remain questions to be asked that require