Bridging research and practice to implement change in teaching and learning at scale

This symposium explores the challenges of applying research at scale through the consideration of a case study of a collaboration between a consortium of learning sciences researchers from five institutions and science education leaders from 10 US states. The case is the OpenSciEd Project, which is an initiative to create and disseminate a 3-year, middle school science program. The OpenSciEd project has the explicit goal of meeting three competing goals in order to have impact at scale: implementing findings from research (research-based), meeting the practical constraints of American public school classrooms (practicality), and creating products that will be widely adopted in the market place (marketability). In this symposium, we will discuss how these three competing goals have influenced the organization of the project, the design of instructional materials, the design of professional learning experiences for teachers, and the collection and analysis of data in field trials.