Question 3
How will you know that the research you are building into your CPD activities is good?
There are many, often rather fraught, arguments in the academic world about good research design. There is a broad consensus however, about some key components that are important if the goal is to create knowledge for the use of others. The Panel has tried to encapsulate these in the following, plain language criteria for evaluating research:
Teacher research or enquiry aiming at creating knowledge needs to have:
- a clear idea of what the teacher wants to find out - a question or hypothesis to explore. Examples of the sorts of questions teachers have wanted to explore include:
How can Internet use in lessons help pupils ... the specific learning objectives for the lesson?
Does handwriting speed contribute to higher pupil achievement?
Does the use of visual imagery promote pupil learning in mental mathematics?
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a strategy for building on what is already known - for example by reading relevant research reports about the issue being explored;
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a plan for collecting useful and manageable evidence systematically on a sustained basis;
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a logic for ensuring that the evidence to be collected will help to answer the question;
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a means of ensuring that evidence from one source can be checked against another (often called triangulation). For example, teacher perceptions about a lesson might be checked against a sound or video recording or against pupil perceptions;
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a plan for analysing the evidence that looks for things that both confirm and contradict the question or hypothesis;
an account of what went on that enables other teacher or researchers try it out for themselves and/or understand the basis of any conclusions;
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an account that indicates conclusions so that others can interpret the evidence for their own context.
If you are looking at research reports or plans, asking yourself whether you are clear how the research tackled or will tackle the list outlined above, should help you decide how good the work is.
In fact, very few research projects are equally strong in all these respects. But having a clear goal always matters – although the research process also helps to refine goals as the work proceeds.
The relative importance of other criteria depends on the aim.
Where the overriding issue is the teacher's own learning it is much more important to have, for example, a coach (often a colleague) working with the teacher who can help them continually refine their learning goals than to start out with a clear question. Teaching and learning are complex processes, so often the early stages of an enquiry take the form of clarifying the core questions. Building time and support for this kind of reflection is important for learning and for research - and easily overlooked.
Research targeted at school or professional learning goals can be as formal or informal as the teacher involved wants. They might range from a performance management target to an agreement between colleagues who share a class to try something new. What matters is whether the process meets their needs. But the more teachers want to share their work with teachers who don't work closely with them, the more important it is to organise the work systematically.
If the aim is to support or inform teachers who have no involvement at all in research processes, then more of the criteria set out above are relevant - the choices about which needs to be made in the light of fitness for purpose.
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