The Practical in Educational Research *A paper prepared for the Round Table of Directors of Educational Researeh, Department of Superintendence, National Education Association, Detroit, Michigan, February 24, 1916.

From the beginning, demands for the practical have harassed the researchers in chemistry, physics, astronomy, or biology. Abundantly practical have been the ultimate results of a score of pioneer studies which were of only academic interest to our learned ancestors, and unheard of by the contemporaneous multitudes. What seems purely academic, theoretical, or even visionary to one generation or individual may be of demonstrated utility to another. To prove this, one needs only to trace the manufacture and present economic significance of drugs, pure food stuffs, anesthetics, dyes, metals; or of dynamos, motors, telephones and wireless?all electrical devices,? the steam engine, specialized factory machines, and the aeroplane; or of modern navigation; or of medicine, surgery, as well as of scientific agriculture. Philosophers easily show the impossibility of limiting rigidly the concept, practical. The practical in education is as difficult to define as it is in chemistry or geology. We