Clarifying the Impact of Educational Research on Students' Learning

Abstract

In our first editorial (Cai et al., 2017), we highlighted the long-standing, critical issue of improving the impact of educational research on practice. We took a broad view of impact, defining it as research having an effect on how students learn mathematics by informing how practitioners, policymakers, other researchers, and the public think about what mathematics education is and what it should be. As we begin to dig more deeply into the issue of impact, it would be useful to be more precise about what impact means in this context. In this editorial, we focus our attention on defining and elaborating exactly what we mean by “the impact of educational research on students' learning.”