Making the invisible visible: Preparing preservice teachers for first steps in linking research to practice

• Collaborative instructor/librarian workshops benefit the search for research.
• Connecting research to teaching starts with an articulation of the information need.
• Preservice teachers need practice in narrowing/expanding research topics.
• Preservice teachers need support identifying relevant search terms.
• Selecting relevant research articles is a complex process for preservice teachers.

Despite the widespread expectation that teachers leverage research to meet the needs of diverse students, little is known about how to prepare preservice teachers to engage in this complex process. This quasi-experimental study examines a collaborative, standards-based intervention that prepares preservice teachers to articulate classroom-based problems, create research-guiding questions, and design effective search strategies. A MANOVA test indicated that the intervention is associated with stronger performance on those first steps. The authors provide detailed descriptions of the intervention and its results in order to offer a roadmap for supporting preservice teachers in the foundational steps of linking research to practice.