Understanding the pedagogical gap between the educational research and the reality of teachers: an analisis of the difficulties and proposals

Abstract

Unlike other fields of knowledge in which research is synonymous of progress, in the educational field, research is not seen as a pillar to improve teaching practice. Taking this problem as a starting point, open responses of 264 Spanish teachers from all educational stages were analysed on the reasons why teachers do not give importance to educational research, as well as the possible proposals to improve this situation. After an inductive analysis, the findings suggest that there was a total of 19 reasons why teachers do not give importance to educational research, and 15 proposals to improve their involvement, being these categories accepted unanimously regardless the educational stage of the teachers. On the one hand, the main reasons why educational research does not impact on teaching practice were 4: lack of training, lack of time, teachers’ comfort zone and difficulty of transference of the results to the classroom. On the other hand, the main proposals to improve this situation were also 4: training throughout the university degree and throughout working life, changing the distribution of time (fewer hours of teaching and more hours of research), distribution of incentives (economic, merits ...), and proposal of practical and real topics of what the teachers need in class.