Collaborations in Mind, Brain, and Education: An Analysis of ResearcherPractitioner Partnerships in Three Elementary School Intervention Studies

A reciprocal relationship informing both researchandpractice isoneof theprimarygoals in theemerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE), yet the field has little documentation and analysis of such collaborations. In this article, we present case studies of three research–practice partnerships taking place between scientists and educators. By comparing and contrasting these three partnerships we expect to illuminate common characteristics, challenges, and benefits that come with doing MBE work. One of the primary goals in the field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) is to join research from the biological and social sciences with education so that educationwill be more solidly grounded in researchandresearchcanberefinedtohavepractical applicability (Coch,Michlovitz, Ansari,&Baird, 2009; Fischer, Bernstein, & Immordino-Yang, 2007; Fischer, Goswami, Geake, & the Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience, 2010). Despite many articles discussing the importance of interaction between the research and practice 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2Present address: Department of Psychology, Columbia University 3The Learning Games Network Address correspondence to Rebecca E. Martin, Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience Unit, Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 AmsterdamAve, New York, NY 10027; e-mail: rem2178@ columbia.edu. domains, there is adearthofempirical evidencedescribingsuch collaborations(Coch&Ansari, 2009;Hinton&Fischer,2008). In this article, we present three case studies of scientist–practitioner collaborations and identify attributes that have contributed to success, and strategies for mitigating challenges. The partnerships discussed in this article were chosen because they are transdisciplinary in nature, drawn from neuroscience, developmental psychology, and education, and thus falling under the umbrella of MBE. To acquire multiple points of view on each partnership, both university researchers and educational administrators were interviewed. All three partnerships share several commonalities. First, they were all formed to test an educational intervention meant for eventual application in the classroom. Second, they were created in a laboratory setting based on findings from developmental, educational, cognitive, and neural sciences. Third, they all have been established on-site in elementary school classrooms. Fourth, all three interventions have been designed around validated and normed behavioral assessments (e.g., WASI, Woodcock Johnson Test of Cognitive Abilities) as measures of the impact of the intervention. Finally, each intervention has integrated brain imaging as a component of the study design.