Social Impact of Educational Research: the INCLUD-ED case and its implications for Research Impact Assessment

Author(s):

Òscar Prieto-Flores(presenting / submitting)Sandra Racionero-Plaza Aitor Gómez Joan Cabré

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

09. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement

Format:

Paper

Session Information

09 SES 12 C, Current Issues in Assessments and Evaluations

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-05

09:00-10:30

Room:

B009 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Jennifer Lorenz

Contribution

Scientific debates on how Educational Research reach policy and social impact serving the public good has been present in many discussions and fora especially in the last decade (Ball, 2012; Willinsky, 2002). An agreement does exist that high quality research should be fundamental to the improvement of educational policy and practice (Southerland, Gadsden, & Herrington, 2014).

The ways on identifying how scientific research impacts on society and improves policy and practice are various. Some authors from research assessment literature highlight the need to focus on how a research project generates Productive Interactions –understood as the exchanges between researchers and stakeholders in which knowledge is produced and valued and is both scientifically robust and socially relevant –. This approach emphasizes the need to identify through quantitative and qualitative indicators how researchers directly or indirectly interact with stakeholders and policy-makers (Spaapen & van Drooge, 2011, p.212). Others point out the need to develop tools and mechanisms to identify how these interactions bring to research developments that have impact on society (Penfield, Baker, Scoble & Wykes, forthcoming). While this approach gives us a background to understand and identify social transfer of research outcomes, we are intending to explore in deep what we identify by its policy and social impact.

In this paper, we present the case of the INCLUD-ED research, Strategies for Inclusion and Social Cohesion in Europe from Education (2006-2011), an Integrated Project funded under the 6th EU Research Framework Programme which results are still having relevant policy and social impact. The European Commission selected INCLUD-ED as one of the ten Success Stories in all the areas of Research (European Commission, 2011). Specifically, we present here the Social Impact of INCLUD-ED project and the implications it has for Research Impact Assessment by highlighting how its results are being transferred to schools and policies but also how its results have Social Impact. We will discuss these findings in relation to the recently launched project IMPACT-EV. Evaluating the impact and outcomes of EU SSH research (2014-2017) funded under the EU FP7 programme and specially with the literature review expected to be finished on June 2014.

Method

The methodology used in the INCLUD-ED was the Communicative Methodology. Research conducted with this methodology implies continuous and egalitarian dialogue among researchers and the people involved in the communities and realities being studied. To this dialogue, researchers bring existing scientific knowledge, and the researched subjects contribute knowledge from their lifeworlds. Thanks to this process, new understandings emerge informing solutions to many social problems. Later, social actors lobby for the development of effective social policy based on those solutions (Flecha, Gómez & Puigvert, 2011). Then, specifically for this paper at the ECER, we carried out an extended policy analysis of all European, national and regional policy documents in which INCLUD-ED recommendations were gathered and transferred. Once this analysis was developed, the team gathered quantitative evidence from the schools where the Successful Actions the INCLUD-ED project identified and recommended are taking place. On the other hand, IMPACT-EV literature review will be finished on month 6 of the project (by June, 2014). This analysis of the literature will also follow the communicative methodology of research. Therefore, the findings and results will be categorised according to the exclusionary and transformative dimensions defined as follows. The exclusionary dimension is that which identifies the elements and factors lead to the lack of impact (scientific, political and social) of the research. The transformative dimension identifies actions that have promoted the success of the impact of the research. IMPACT-EV researchers will classify the contributions from the literature according to the sort of impact it refers to and most importantly, whether this contributions identify the elements that lead to and promote the research impact (transformative) or not (exclusionary). Finally, evidence gathered from the INCLUD-ED case will be contrasted with IMPACT-EV approach and literature review in order to explore the implications of INCLUD-ED for Research Impact Assessment on Social Impact.

Expected Outcomes

INCLUD-ED has already had important socio-political impact; its main results have been included in almost all recent documents on education by the European Commission and the European Council. For example, last February 2011 the European Commission published a document recommending the Member States ways to overcome school failure and abandon in Europe, and suggested the implementation of successful actions identified in INCLUD-ED. The results of INCLUD-ED have informed other resolutions and documents from the European Commission, such as the Strategy of the EU to favor the integration of the Roma, approved by the Commission of Culture of the European Parliament in January 2011, and the Resolution of the European Parliament on the Education of Children of Migrants (April, 2009). But INCLUD-ED has also informed and specially carried out change from below on more than two hundred schools around Spain, Brazil, Peru, México and the United Kingdom that are developing the Successful Actions identified by the project such as Interactive Groups (Valls & Kyriakides, 2013), Dialogic Literary Gatherings (Serrano & Mirceva, 2010), Tutored Library and Family Education (Flecha, 2012) among others (Soler, M. 2011; Racionero & Padrós, 2010). These results are expected to show how we can attribute policy and social impact to a specific research project. The evidence gathered in the policy analysis and in the qualitative fieldwork as well as the one provided by the schools would give us the opportunity to establish a scientific dialogue on these mixed outcomes with the audience. The contributions of the state of the art from IMPACT-EV and the specific analysis we carry out in this paper about the INCLUD-ED project will be contrasted and discussed. In this sense, authors will show how educational research can show and demonstrate improvements in the lives of the communities involved and how these improvements can be gathered and shown for Research Impact Assessment.

References

Ball, A.F. (2012). To Know is Not Enough: Knowledge, Power and the Zone of Generativity. Educational Researcher, 41, 283-293. European Commission. (2011). Added Value of Research, Innovation and Science portfolio. Retrieved on January 29th 2014, from: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-11-520_en.htm?locale=en Flecha, R. (2014). Buenas practices: Cómo lograr impacto en los proyectos del Reto 6. H2020 jornada informative del Reto 6. Talk carried out on January, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Flecha, R., Gómez, A., & Puigvert, L. (2011). Critical Communicative Methodology: Informing Real Social Transformation Through Research, Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), 235-245. Flecha, A. (2012). Family Education Improve Student’s Academic Performance: Contributions from European Research. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 3(2), 301-321. Penfield, T., Baker, M.J., Scoble, R., & Wykes, M.C. (forthcoming). Assessment, Evaluations, and Definitions of Research Impact: A Review. Research Evaluation. Racionero, S. & Padrós, M. (2010). The Dialogic Turn in Educational Psychology. Journal of Psychodidactics, 15(2), 143-162. Serrano, M.A. & Mirceva, J. (2010). Dialogic Imagination in Literacy Development. Journal of Psychodidactics, 15(2), 191-205. Soler, M. (2011). Editorial. Special Issue on Education, poverty and inclusion. European Journal of Education, 46(2), 169-284. Southerland, S.A., Gadsden, V.L. & Herrington, C.D. (2014). Editor’s Introduction: What Should Count as Quality Education Research? Countinuing the Discussion. Educational Researcher, 43, 7-8. Doi: 10.3102/0013189X13519962. Spaapen, J., & van Drooge, L. (2011). Introducing “productive interactions” in social impact assessment. Research Evaluation, 20(3), 211-218. Valls, R. (2013). The Power of Interactive Groups: How diversity of adults volunteering in classroom groups can promote inclusion and success for children of vulnerable minority ethnic populations. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(1), 17-33. Willinsky, J. (2002). The Strategic Education Research Program and the Public Value of Research. Educational Researcher, 30, 5-14.

Author Information

Òscar Prieto-Flores (presenting / submitting)

University of Girona

Pedagogy

Girona

Sandra Racionero-Plaza

University of Barcelona, Spain

Aitor Gómez

University Rovira i Virgili, Spain

Joan Cabré