As staff members of the Texas literacy resource center, we are always interested in how practitioners use the research related materials our center distributes. Do they have any impact on practice, and is this what practitioners expect when they call us up and ask to borrow materials, or visit our website? In 2002 we conducted a research project to discover what practitioners really think of research, and what kind of use they make of it. Even though the authors are all trained academic researchers we entered the project determined to bracket our professional perspective and build bridges across a gulf we perceived between practitioner and researcher views of research.

The central idea of this discussion is application - the way that research gets applied to practice in an educational context. As Hammersley (2002) points out, looking at issues of application involves considering three questions: what the role of research is and has been in the past, what it could be, and what it ought to be. In this discussion we mainly tackle the first question, though we discuss the implications of our findings and make recommendations in the spirit of the third question. We view the relationship of research to practice as a serious problem, especially in the light of current US policy calling for high quality research information to underpin all educational provision (USDOE, 2002). It is extremely pressing for researchers and practitioners to get together and work out what are reasonable expectations of research, and how they can be met and buy research paper.