Session Information
Session 7A, Educational Research Methodology (Part 3)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
09:00-10:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Volker Kraft
Contribution
Over the last decade, there has been an increasing interest, in the UK and elsewhere, in both applied and practice based research in education, with a growing number of important initiatives being funded by national governments and other agencies. It is clear that such initiatives vary widely in their ways of working, conceptualizations of the links between research, policy and practice, and of 'applied' or 'practice-based' research. However, to date, relatively little work has been undertaken in clarifying the different approaches or the ways in which either their quality or their effectiveness can be judged. The changing contexts and modes of social research stimulate the need for re-thinking the concept of quality in social and educational research, in order to create a space where applied and basic, individual and collaborative, pre-determined and evolving, quantitative and qualitative designs can develop or combine and still be assessed fairly. In the British context, in the light of the announcement that, for the next national assessment of research (2008), panels will be expected to recognize the importance of applied and practice based research, there is now an urgent need to document and clarify the underlying principles of different types of such research and to develop appropriate quality criteria. Such a process is also important for policy makers, who are now investing substantially in the support of applied and practice based research, and of course for practitioners themselves who are increasingly turning to forms of research in the development of their own practice. This paper reports on a project based at Oxford University Department of Educational Studies and commissioned by the ESRC (2004-2005). The aim of this study was to bring some conceptual clarity to the different approaches to applied and practice based research in the field of education, with a view to developing appropriate quality criteria for the academic, policy and user communities. The strategy adopted was threefold. A review of standards and criteria in use or recommended in a wide range of documents (scholarly, practice- and policy-orientated literature, official reports, standards and guidelines) was supplemented by a set of interviews with key persons in the UK who provided insights on the models of applied and practice based research currently in use and suggested ways in which their specific could be taken into account in the research evaluation process. Finally, the ongoing conclusions were developed within a larger consultation process, involving a working day in July 2004 (which brought together key representatives of the British academic, policy and practitioner communities), but also the input from an advisory board and from symposia at BERA 2004 and UCET 2004. The various models of applied and practice-based research, the discourses about the relations between research, policy and practice, the existent procedures and criteria for assessing research, and their philosophical underpinnings were thus explored. On this basis, the study puts forward a framework that outlines the multiple dimensions along which applied and practice-based research in education might be fairly and sensibly assessed: epistemic, technological, phronetic, and economic. These multiple dimensions of quality are meant to try and bridge some of the incongruencies between the internal aims and quality standards that guide a research project in its processuality, on the one hand, and the aims and requirements that shape external evaluators' understanding of quality, on the other hand. However, for the proposed framework to be functional, increased clarity is needed both in the formulation of the claims to knowledge/ to use and of the internal standards, on the part of the researchers, and in the communication of criteria and expectations, on the part of the evaluators.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.