The poster focuses on a rarely addressed issue in educational research and educational practice, on school teachers´ perceptions of and attitudes towards educational research. The aim of the study was to investigate the attitudes of 259 (randomly selected) Czech teachers of lower and upper secondary schools towards educational research, and to find out which factors influence them.

The research was based on the results of foreign studies (Turkish, American and Australian), where teachers´ perceptions of academic research and its products are described. These products are often perceived negatively for the following reasons:

(a) limited extent of usefulness (in terms of quality, Buchmann, 1984), (b) technical style of academic texts, (c) difficulty to understand, or (d) limited impact on practice (West, Rhoton, 1994; Bevan, 2004). Buchmann (1984) considers the usefulness of the findings in terms of the utilization of knowledge.  In her view, the concept of knowledge intends to suggest what people (in our case teachers) should do and what knowledge should be like: people should use knowledge or expand it in practice. The Czech academic community also considers qualities of academic research products. For example, Prucha (2005) describes three qualities: (a) relationship between the product and teacher needs, (b) quality of the product, (c) communicability of the product (to users). In this regard, we can speak about evidence-based practice / education (DiPardo et al, 2006), or about the relationship between scholars and teachers (Rhine, 1998).

Another significant factor of quality of research findings is the discourse the academics use. The language in the studies may pose different demands on readers depending on the terminology, technical style of writing, etc. (Ozturk 2010, 2011). The problems arise due to differences in the language (its target, needs etc) of communities (teachers, academics). When we look at the language of teachers and language of academics (scholars), we must raise the question: who should be closer to whom – academics to teachers, or teachers to academics (with regard to evidence-based practice)?

Other authors write about teachers´ attitudes towards scholars (authors of educational studies) and their credibility which is determined by their separation from real instruction (Gore, Gitlin, 2004 and Joram, 2007).

For the detection of the teachers´ perceptions and attitudes, hypotheses oriented on the rate of influence of the specific variables were formulated, and relevant questions posed about: gender (sex), length of practice, teachers´ perception of researchers, perception of usefulness of educational research, perception of the use of educational research, perceptions of difficulty and complexity of studies. Additional questions addressed variables such as research topics and sources (e.g. web, academic / popular journals, etc., searched for by the teachers .

The poster should reveal the results of the research into Czech teachers´ perceptions of educational research and researchers. The outcomes will be discussed with regard to culture specific issues, i.e. with regard to the research conducted in other countries.

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