Angel Bohannon ^1* Caitlin Farrell ² Spencer Cook ^3*

• ¹ NORC at The University of Chicago, Chicago, United States
• ² University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States
• ³ Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States

Under federal policy guidelines, school districts are increasingly expected to engage with research evidence to guide their efforts around instructional improvement. However, existing scholarship often describes challenges in using research to inform practice. In this article, we draw on a year-long case study of two rural districts engaged in a continuous improvement research-practice partnership on elementary mathematics education. We present evidence of how research-based mathematics ideas shared by research partners moved into educators' work. We argue that these findings can be explained, in part, by how the county office designed and facilitated a boundary infrastructure that created important learning opportunities around research ideas. Importantly, the county office’s efforts to broker knowledge did not just involve overcoming or transcending boundaries but also maintaining boundaries in cases where they perceived external partners to be “overstepping.” We then describe implications for research and practice.