Yanchar Presentation Adds New Insight to the Theory-Practice Gap

Yanchar's team hopes to help teachers adapt teaching methodology for further theory-use.

American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life." Scholars in most fields of study are well acquainted with abstract theory. Yet within daily life theory often does not appear to meet practice. Observed gaps between abstract theories and their practical application motivated faculty members Stephen C. Yanchar and David D. Williams of the Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology (IP&T), doctoral student Joseph B. South, and Brent G. Wilson of the University of Colorado to begin research on applications of theory to practice in their area of study.

Their presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) in October of 2007 was only the beginning of a very long road. Ultimately they hope for a three-fold result: (1) that theorists are provided data and insight that will lead them to develop theories that could be more practical in their application, (2) that teachers will better understand the challenges and strengths that practitioners face and hopefully incorporate them into their teaching methodology, and (3) that practitioners who have been able to use theory effectively will be able to advise other practitioners who have not and are looking for ways to do so.

Yanchar and South continue to contact and visit various instructional design companies, trying to find out generally which theories are being used and how they are being implemented. "We've developed these abstract theories in the academic world--at the universities of BYU, Utah State, and so on--[but] what happens when they go out into the real world?" Yanchar questioned. "Does anybody care about them? Do they know about them? Do they use them? Do they use parts of them? Do they use them in ways the theorist would endorse? Do they take them in other directions altogether? We don't even know."

Thus far, the team has found that most people outside the world of academic research do not use theory because they do not understand it fully enough to use it, or they just don't find it applicable. South points out that practitioners are usually driven by use-value criteria, so when a theory seems to have no practical use to them there is little chance of it being applied. If, however, within the classroom, whether in school or in training, the theory is taught and then applied practically with a teacher working beside the student, it may then have more of a use-value when that student becomes a practitioner.

Yanchar's findings, he admits, could possibly be used within classrooms to effectively narrow the gap between theory and practice, but that application would be further down the road. Currently the team is trying to produce data-based accounts of how practitioners such as trainers and instructional designers view and use various theories in their everyday work outside of academia. "This important foundational research," says South of their recent work and AECT presentation. "The long-term goal is to reconceptualize the nature of theory itself so that it is more readily usable by practitioners."

10 March 2008