From ’technical rationality’ and ’refle...

This contribution builds on Koichu, Aguilar, and Misfeldt (2021), who regard implementation as “an ecological disruption to a particular mathematics education system, through the gradual endorsement of innovation in conjunction with an action plan” (p. 986), and follows Willke (2005), who regards observation as noticing a “meaningful difference”, and intervention as “effecting” (generating, making) the “meaningful difference”, thus ‘implementing’ steps towards the desired situation.Based on four examples, Krainer (2021) argues that the implementation of research, and its implementability, are dependent not only on researchers and on practitioners, but also on policymakers, too, in particular if scaling up is regarded as important. Writing a paper for a special issue on implementation-related research in mathematics education (see Koichu, Aguilar, & Misfeldt, 2021), reflecting on the long-lasting Austrian initiative IMST (which mainly aims at scaling up innovations in mathematics, computer science, science, and technology teaching), inspired the author to theoretical considerations on the interplay between policy, practice, and research in the IMST context. He describes two contrasting approaches related to implementation and implementability of research, namely ‘technical rationality’ and ‘reflective rationality’, and develops a third approach named ‘societal rationality’.