A teacher sits alone in her classroom, after the last bell of the day has rung. She has done a quick Google Scholar search on reading disabilities and is reading the latest research report. While she understands the basics of the experimental paradigm, it still seems disconnected from what she experiences in the classroom on a day-to-day basis. Somehow, no one ever seems to research the questions she really is concerned with. Frustrated, she clicks on an ad in the sidebar. “Brain-based reading program! Guaranteed results! Only $199!” The flashy website at least seems to understand the problems she faces in the classroom every day, but can these “scientific” claims be trusted?

Sound familiar? Most educators and researchers are part of this old paradigm, where researchers study questions that interest them, far away in their ivory tower, and educators are expected to be “informed” by the latest research that does not attempt to address their needs. As a result, education suffers from the lack of usable knowledge. Unlike the field of medicine, for example, there is little productive synergy between research and practice that leads to innovations in practice and new directions in research. Instead, teachers are left to figure things out on their own under increasingly oppressive state standards—and what interest they do have in science leaves them open to “neuromyths” and unfounded claims about “brain based learning.”

But another way forward is possible. Kurt Fischer’s recent article, “Building a scientific groundwork for learning and teaching,” argues that the primary goal of the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education is to join biology, cognitive science, development, and education in order to create a sound grounding of education in research. Practitioners and researchers must establish two-way, reciprocal relationships, working together to formulate research questions and methods that will move both science and teaching forward. This two-way collaboration is the only way that education can benefit from the kind of usable knowledge regularly created in fields like medicine.

We must build the best integration of research with practice, creating a strong infrastructure that joins scientists with educators to study effective learning and teaching in educational settings. Science and practice together provide many potentially powerful tools to improve education. The fields of neuroscience and genetics, cognitive science, and developmental and learning science each have important contributions to make to this new reciprocal relationship.

Neuroscience and genetics allow us to peek into the “black box” of biological processes that underpin learning, affording us new insight into how our bodies both constrain and facilitate learning. For example, when two boys had to have half of their brains removed due to epilepsy, neuroscientific information about the brain provided useful information to caregivers and educators about the challenges they were likely to face. The boys developed remarkably well, exhibiting many surprising skills, including language facility. Further studies with the two boys revealed that they achieved these skills in very different ways, based on the characteristic processing patterns of the brain hemisphere that each of them retained. In both cases, there was no separation of neuroscience from education, no barrier that prevented the use of neuroscientific knowledge to facilitate learning. The same is true of all learners. In general, biological knowledge about abilities and disabilities can facilitate both general understanding and specific adaptations to support effective learning.

Cognitive science can impact education by providing analyses of the mental models and metaphors that pervade meaning making in human cultures. Our mental models sometimes support myths about learning and the brain, myths that inhibit optimal learning. For example, most of us hold the “conduit” model of knowledge transfer—we view learning as transferring information from one person to another. Teachers have an idea, give it to their students, then the students have it. Students who do not learn the ideas they are given are judged to be lazy or stupid, or the teacher is judged to have done a poor job at transmitting the knowledge. Of course, learning is not so simple. Knowledge is based in activity, activity that then shapes how our brains work. The conduit model needs to be replaced with a model that focuses on the active construction of knowledge.

Developmental and learning science have studied the active construction of knowledge for decades, and recent methodological advances have produced tools to analyze learning pathways. Learning pathways are a description of how people constructs skills along a common scale, or universal ruler. Because many different types of skills all pass through the same levels of this universal ruler, researchers can construct diverse learning pathways that nonetheless share a common scale. These learning pathways capture both shared patterns and learning differences and can then be coordinated with curricula, task characteristics, and teaching techniques. In particular, learning pathways emphasize the importance of support, where students can typically perform at a higher level under conditions of support compared to independent or unpracticed tasks.

The lenses of cognitive science and developmental science come together in an example related to mathematics learning. For students without an explicit model of the number line, explicit instruction in the principle of counting along the number line had a striking impact on math understanding. Cognitive science revealed the importance of the number line metaphor in strong mathematical reasoners, and developmental science helped to design developmentally appropriate interventions to help children construct their understanding of number.

These three branches of science—biology (neuroscience and genetics), cognitive science, and developmental science—have contributed valuable insight to the field of education in the past and are well poised for further contributions in researcher-practitioner partnerships. These reciprocal partnerships are essential for the creation of useable knowledge in education.  But certain changes are needed to establish this vision.

To reach the potential of grounding education effectively in research requires improving infrastructure by creating research schools, sharing databases on learning and development, and establishing a new profession of “educational engineers.” Research schools are similar to teaching hospitals, where researchers and practitioners work together to refine medical technique. Research schools should be real-life schools closely affiliated with universities where educators and researchers work together to create research that illuminates educational practice and policy and to train future researchers and practitioners.

Research schools can take the lead in establishing places for devising research questions and methods that relate to issues of practice and policy and databases that track data on student learning. These databases should eventually be shared at the national and international levels. Steps in this direction have been made—for example, the state databases for No Child Left Behind. But we must move beyond simple standardized testing and include information about how learning occurs in real-life settings.

Finally, a new class of educational professional is needed, the “educational engineer,” who will act as a translator between research and practice. An educational engineer can help can help apply findings from cognitive science and neuroscience to learning in classrooms and can engineer educational materials and activities grounded in research that promote learning.

Teachers that are interested in the biological, cognitive, and developmental aspects of learning should not have to sit in their classrooms alone with Google Scholar as their only resource for learning more. Moreover, they should not have to view themselves as passive recipients of the conduit of knowledge from scientists-on-high down to education. Instead, they should be active participants in the research process. Their knowledge provides vital insight, insight that can move science forward, just as insight from practicing doctors informs basic medical research. Researchers interested in topics relevant to education should embrace this knowledge and allow their research programs to be shaped by practical needs. Together, researchers and practitioners can lay the groundwork for a true science of education.