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Improving the quality of educational research: challenges and roles
For whom is educational research undertaken? The answer to the question is not
straightforward. There are probably two major sorts of research report - one being a
major report commissioned by a funder, the second the traditional academic journal
article which is subject to peer review, with peers being academic researchers.
An associated issue is the variation of quality of reporting in research articles. An
analysis of this variation led to the production of guidance in the writing of research
articles, which was drawn to the attention of journal editors by the education ministry
in the UK (Newman et al. 2004). For the period of the Labour government (1997-2010)
there was considerable central government investment in the development of one par-
ticular process for systematic review (see www.eppi.ioe.ac.uk) in an attempt to synthe-
size research findings, following a not dissimilar model established for medicine from
the Cochrane reviews (www.cochranecollaboration.org), but without the success of the
Cochrane collaboration. However, the Campbell Collaboration work is acknowledged as
having the potential to provide an international lead for education in synthesis.
One direct consequence of the availability of the Internet is to make available
educational research which previously might have been difficult to find. This creates
an unmanageable volume of potentially relevant material for the user who wishes to
build on the evidence base of what has happened before. Take, for example, modern
foreign languages (MFL) teaching: when MFL was being introduced into the primary
curriculum by the UK government in 2003, over 5000 research articles covering rel-
evant elements of pedagogy were found to produce guidance about the evidence
base for practice; these needed to be read, synthesized and the relevant information
extracted to produce an effective evidence base for practice.
It would be unrealistic to expect any teacher, practitioner, research user or research
generator to become familiar with such a volume of material. In any case many of the
articles were not sufficiently well constructed nor did they report the research in sufficient
depth for users to be confident about changing personal or national practice on the basis
of their findings. In addition, the cost of the production of such material in staff time
alone must have been in the region of many millions of dollars. This one example rep-
resents a waste of resources in the system, and the volume of articles is replicated across
the major areas of educational practice. However, research into fine-grained aspects of
educational practice is missing or very difficult to find. Take, for example, research into
barriers that learners have to overcome in understanding concepts in many subject areas.
Currently e-resources supporting knowledge management in education are
scattered, inaccessible and incoherent. Clearly, responsibility needs to be taken at
the national and international levels for the development of an e-infrastructure to
provide signposts, validation of content and meeting places for education practi-
tioners dedicated to the development of professional knowledge. In gathering evi-
dence for the parliamentary select committee, Leask and Younie (2009) found that
for teachers, access to much of this up-to-date knowledge is patchy. In addition,
further research conducted with practitioners (from across primary, secondary and
FE) Leask and Preston (2010) identified that UK teachers wanted an e-infrastructure
to provide access to validated knowledge and the means of collaborative creation of
new knowledge. This is clearly possible with the widespread availability of Web 2.0
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