The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is committed to strengthening relations between research and practice and to the development of a coherent knowledge base that is usable in practice. The need to work toward connection and coherence is not unique to the field of mathematics education. Fields such as medicine, software engineering, and social work routinely attend to these issues. In this article, the NCTM Research Committee seeks to promote attention to and active engagement in addressing issues of connection and coherence. The authors focus on research that strives toward coherence and connection to practice not only in response to the aforementioned NCTM imperative, but also grounded in concerns expressed by scholars in the field about both the coherence of research and its connections to practice. (Contains 3 figures and 6 footnotes.)