  Physics Education Research (PER) practitioners have engaged in substantial
curriculum development and dissemination work in recent years. Yet, it appears
that this work has had minimal influence on the fundamental teaching practices
of typical physics faculty. To better understand this situation interviews were
conducted with 5 likely users of physics education research. All reported
making changes in their instructional practices and all were influenced, to
some extent, by educational research. Yet, none made full use of educational
research and most had complaints about their interactions with educational
researchers. In this paper we examine how these instructors used educational
research in making instructional decisions and identify divergent expectations
about how researchers and faculty can work together to improve student
learning. Although different instructors emphasized different aspects of this
discrepancy between expectations, we believe that they are all related to a
single underlying issue: the typical dissemination model is to disseminate
curricular innovations and have faculty adopt them with minimal changes while
faculty expect researchers to work with them to incorporate research-based
knowledge and materials into their unique instructional situations.
Implications and recommendations are discussed.
