New initiatives are on the drawing board at NSF, and by the time this editorial is published, they may have been announced. Over the past year, I have had experiences and heard of others' experiences in which mathematicians have seriously questioned our research outcomes as a valid basis for making decisions about mathematics education matters. These mathematicians say that we have built-in biases that affect our work because we enter the research already believing in what the research will show. This issue is a serious one that continues to undermine strong working relations with the mathematics community. Perhaps if more mathematicians became partners in mathematics education research, such as Hyman Bass did when he collaborated with Deborah Ball at the University of Michigan, better understandings would develop.
Teachers form a particularly important audience for our research.
The manner in which research is reported in journals such as JRME, important as this style may be in convincing our peers that the research meets expected standards, is a turnoff for Page 4 most teachers. Some researchers rewrite their research reports for a teacher audience and send it off to one of the NCTM school journals, or they write NCTM yearbook chapters that build on the research. One suggestion made at the Conference on Doctoral Programs was to require a dissertation composed of one or two research articles and an article reporting the research to teachers. Such a practice would emphasize the importance of communicating with this audience. One of my final projects as editor of JRME is to produce a book of readings that are based on the articles I have accepted for publication and that hold important information for teachers.