AARE Focus Conference Paper Abstracts - Cairns 2005

ISSN 1324-9339

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ABSTRACTS of PAPERS

A

AL05030Y     KEYNOTE ADDRESS
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A collaborative approach to knowledge building to strengthen policy and practice in education: The New Zealand Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis Programme

Adrienne Alton-Lee, Ministry of Education, New Zealand

There is a valuable but inaccessible and fragmented research literature in education about approaches that enhance or undermine social and academic outcomes for diverse learners. The focus of this paper is on a national collaborative knowledge building strategy to draw upon and synthesise this literature: the New Zealand Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis (BES) Programme1. The approach aims to strengthen the use of evidence-based approaches in both educational policy and practice. This paper explains the ways in which a fitness-for-purpose approach has driven the methodology and the processes used in the Iterative BES Programme. Because the purpose is to inform educational development, the focus is on what works, and specifically on what can be learned from the evidence about what works, under what conditions, why, and how. Attention is given to the magnitude of impact of influences. Particular attention is given to strengthening the evidence-base about the nature of educational change and the processes that support educational development. The Iterative BES approach draws upon collaborative processes between researchers, policy-makers, and educators. These processes are helping to strengthen capability in research and development and to achieve policy relevance and accessibility for educators. The paper concludes by raising questions for researchers about their roles in contributing to collaborative knowledge building that can make a positive difference in education.

¹ www.minedu.govt.nz/goto/bestevidencesynthesis

AR05006Y
PPT
Directions in Quality and Accessibility

Evan Arthur and Leanne Harvey, Department of Education, Science and Training

The Australian Government is establishing Quality and Accessibility Frameworks for Publicly Funded Research. This presentation will provide an overview of progress with both Frameworks.

The aim of the Research Quality Framework is to provide a mechanism to produce reliable, transparent and efficient assessments of research that is consistent across publicly funded universities and research agencies and that demonstrates the benefits of research to the wider community. During April-May 2005, consultations will be undertaken on the Framework with key stakeholders, culminating in a National Stakeholder Forum in June 2005. The Forum will consider potential models of research assessment. This will be followed by trialling of possible models to feed into advice on Framework options.

Value from research accrues through the effective dissemination of the results of research. The highest quality research is of little utility if it is not discoverable, accessible, and shareable. The Accessibility Framework aims to address this gap by ensuring that the results of research are effectively disseminated. The presentation will provide a summary of advances on the accessibility of publicly funded research, including directions that have been taken in enhancing the dissemination of research outputs in order to maximise the value for money for investment in research.

Keywords: The concept of quality in education research

AR05017Y  ®
PPT
Implications of external research quality assessment for local research leadership: learning from the UK RAE experience

Derrick Armstrong and Peter Goodyear, University of Sydney

Research leadership is a complex activity. Its assumptions, language and practices are justifiably contested. This paper is part of a process of sense-making, arising from our recent migration from (faculty/school) educational research leadership positions in the UK to similar positions in Australia. Dominating the landscape are the UK Research Assessment Exercise and the emerging Australian Research Quality and Accessibility Framework. The focus of our paper is on implications of changes in the assessment of research at the national level for leadership in research at the local (faculty or school) level. We address six sets of issues: alleviating the effects of reductionism in quality assessment; the production and function of narratives about research directions (strengths, distinctiveness; goals; values); interdisciplinary research; research inside and outside 'Pasteur's Quadrant'; inclusivity and research communities; the research:teaching nexus. While we discuss these issues in their local context, we also recognize some of the complex interactions between activity, debate and policy at local, state and national levels. We also look at some of the broader implications of research quality assessment for the educational research community at large, and for relationships between 'producers' and 'users' of educational research.

Keyword: promotion quality

B

BO05011Y    ®
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Using examiner reports to identify quality in PhD theses

Sid Bourke, Allyson Holbrook and Terence Lovat, University of Newcastle

Research reported in PhD theses represents a major component of all educational research undertaken in Australia. As many candidates are also recently or currently practising teachers and administrators, PhD research often has an immediate impact on schools and schooling. Thus the quality of theses is important as a contribution to our national research effort.

A national study in progress has collected candidature information and examiner reports for 804 PhD candidates across all discipline areas who submitted a thesis for examination - of these, 84 theses were in the field of Education. The text of examiner reports is being analysed on the basis of 30 categories. Among the evaluative elements are summative comments about the thesis as a whole or major sections of the thesis.

The summative comment categories, accounting on average for 21% of each examiner report, have been analysed to date for 117 reports on 39 Education theses across four universities, and are being used to create a scale of 'research quality' to grade the theses. The comments are also compared with the examiner recommendations made on each thesis. The results and validity of such a process are discussed.

Keyword: Quality

C

CA05021Y  ®
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Ensuring quality of method in quantitative educational research

Robert Cavanagh and Peter Reynolds, Curtin University of Technology

Quantitative educational research methods are critiqued with a view to identifying how this kind of research can be improved. The paradigmatic considerations of ontology, epistemology and methodology are viewed from a philosophical perspective. A combination of inductive and deductive logic is used to substantiate claims made about quantitative and qualitative research. The substantive content of the paper concerns information on philosophical inquiry, quantitative and qualitative research approaches in education, and the analytic techniques specific to quantitative educational research.

The philosophical critique of quantitative methods highlights limitations of the method in dealing with the temporal and socio-cultural nature of education. This focuses on a bias in the method where more attention is given to methodology than to ontology and epistemology. However, a detailed examination of specific aspects of the quantitative approach suggests that the limitations and bias could be addressed without detracting from the inherent scientific rigour of the incumbent methods.

This is viewed as achievable by incorporating philosophical considerations in the conceptualisation of theoretical models and by exploiting fully multi-variate techniques, statistical modelling techniques, and other recent developments in the construction of attitude scales and analysis of rating scale data.

Keyword: Quality

CU05023Y  ®
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The basis of a Schooling Research Network

Peter Cuttance, The University of Melbourne

Research on schooling in Australia is typically characterised by a large number of small-scale studies that provides a fragmented research base for addressing the core problems that need to be solved. The proposed research Network would seek to build capacity through: research skill development; facilitation of collaboration; development of virtual research teams; engagement of teachers and school leaders in high-quality research projects; and the development of research awareness among educational practitioners and policy makers.

Student learning is at the heart of the enterprise and the strength of the proposed Research Network is in its combination of research and practitioner expertise. Key features of such an enterprise meet the complementarity of interests among the stakeholders which include policy-makers, school systems, professional associations, disciplinary experts and researchers. The author argues that quality research will be promoted through an approach that embodies the following:

• a decentralised research network with a number of problem-focussed virtual nodes;
• establishment of key performance indicators to measure critical processes and outcomes of the Network;
• infrastructure to support the development of new research tools and methodologies;
• the creation of problem-based research communities to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face interaction across constituent groups;
• engagement of significant members of disciplines beyond education faculties;
• use of communication technologies to establish a virtual environment to facilitate both research and the utilisation of research outputs;
• dissemination of findings in a form that meets the needs of end-users of research knowledge;
• the integration of end-users into the processes of planning research and active participation in the Network; and
• development and coordination of physical resources for the collection, storage and secondary analysis of research data.

This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 1 CU05022Y Linking research on schooling, professional practice and educational policy.

Keyword:

D

DI05020Y
PPT
Enabling Early Career Researchers to produce quality research: Some issues and implications for strategic initiatives

Maree DinanThompson, Ruth Hickey and Juanita Sellwood, James Cook University

This paper will elucidate messages received by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) about what counts as 'quality research' as this is expressed through the Australian Research Council policy statements, and through practical initiatives aimed at trying to help ECRs become quality researchers. Drawing on the cases of three ECRs at different points along the ECR continuum, the paper will first describe the messages received by the researchers and then analyse understandings of 'quality research'. On the basis of selected elements of their experiences, the authors will identify and describe specific challenges they face(d) in their attempts to produce quality research. The paper will conclude by presenting issues to be taken into consideration in further initiatives at the levels of policy and practice with a view to enabling ECRs to produce quality research.

Keyword: Quality

E, F

FU05018Y  KEYNOTE ADDRESS
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Applied and practice based research - developing quality criteria

John Furlong, University of Oxford

Within the field of education, there has, over the last decade, been an increasing interest in both applied and practice based research and a number of important initiatives have been funded by national governments and other agencies. It is clear that such initiatives vary widely in their ways of working, how they conceptualise the links between research, policy and practice, and what they mean by the terms 'applied' or 'practice based'. 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 in contributing to the development of policy and practice in education can be judged.

Conventionally, good quality HE based research has a number of common features: it builds on what is known, employs robust and transparent methods of data collection within an explicit theoretical and ethical framework, and it aims to contribute to the public stock of knowledge in ways that can be tested and critiqued by peer review. However, as one moves further away from conventional higher education led research so these traditional quality criteria may need to be added to or indeed to change. This paper reports on a project sponsored by the British ESRC which aims to bring some conceptual clarity to different approaches to applied and practice based research with a view to developing appropriate quality criteria for the academic, policy and user communities.

Keyword: Quality

G

GRO05007Y  ®
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Practitioner Research in Education: Beyond celebration

Susan Groundwater-Smith and Nicole Mockler , University of Sydney

This paper will examine the burgeoning of practitioner inquiry in Australia against the background of the notion of action research as an emancipatory project. This requires that the work move beyond a utilitarian function, important is that may be in terms of enhancing practice, and develops a greater capacity to critique underlying policies. It will argue that if those engaged in practitioner inquiry, and those who support and sponsor them, are to move beyond a celebratory mode then it is critical that a set of criteria are developed that may be used to govern quality; both the quality of the research and the quality of the policies at the local and state levels. The case will be made for developing such a platform founded upon principles of ethicality in the interests of all stakeholders and a broader and better informed notion of evidence based practice. The discussion will clearly have implications for policy and practice.

Keyword

H

HA05024Y  ®
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Applying a communities of practice model to research partnerships

Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and Keryn McGuinness, The University of Melbourne

The quality and relevance of research is determined by those it affects, not just those who fund it or engage in it. A communities of practice model can bring together these diverse interests to meet national and local needs. Practice, the social production of meaning, is the source of coherence of a community. The specific practice of educational research is building and testing knowledge, and through the learning process necessary for this practice, numerous communities emerge, with complex boundaries and peripheries, depending on people's roles, purposes and expertise.

Communication technologies can facilitate communities of practice, so that online dialogue, rather than replacing personal contact, facilitates reflection and connections to other communities. Online environments appear to have potential as a means of increasing the involvement of stakeholders in devising the research agenda, conducting research and sharing the resulting knowledge. Online environments help counter the 'tyranny of distance' and connect stateholders nationally. This paper evaluates the development and implementation of communities of practice supported by the online environment of the National Quality Schooling Framework (www.nqsf.edu.au) and Think.com, and highlights the importance of sociability and usability in achieving quality.

This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 1 CU05022Y Linking research on schooling, professional practice and educational policy.

Keyword:

I

IM05014Y
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Evidence Based Practice: Lessons from the Medical Sciences, and benefits for Education

Wesley Imms, University of Melbourne and Christine Imms, LaTrobe University

"Evidence-based practice" (EBP) is slowly gaining recognition in education as a method of ensuring that quality research can stem from classroom practice and that practice can be informed by research. Developed successfully through the Medical Sciences, what really is EBPs transferability to education? This presentation will cover the following points: What is the EBP framework; Issues of applying EBP in education; Lessons from the health sciences; Skills and knowledge required for growth in EBP.

Parallels will be drawn between Health Sciences' long standing use of EBP and the current Australia-wide Boys Education Lighthouse Schools project (BELS). The BELS project, which demands of teachers a high degree of accountability in terms of measurable outcomes from their practice, will be used to explicate how EBP serves both the research and practice needs of teachers, and ways that it can provide accessibility to, and quality in, research in schools.

When EBP is integrated into professional practice it can provide a vehicle for drawing together researchers, teachers, consumers and policy makers.

Keyword: Features

J, K, L, M

MA05013Y
PPT
Assessment of the quality of research outcomes: The University of Queensland pilot

Doune Macdonald, David Siddle and Ken Richardson, University of Queensland

During 2005, The University of Queensland (UQ) is piloting an assessment of the quality of research outcomes in conjunction with its septennial School review program. UQ's exercise has been informed by a review of international and national initiatives that have sought to gauge research quality (e.g. UK, New Zealand, ANU). This paper will outline the quality exercise process at UQ and the criteria by which quality is judged. It will use the case of the School of Human Movement Studies, a multi-disciplinary school that has a strong education component, to exemplify the impact of the process and criteria the School level.

Keyword: Promotion quality

MA05015Y
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CYBERTEACH - a framework for research, policy, teaching, assessment, accountability and leadership in education!

Pamela Matters, Macquarie University

Rigorous research in Education is well received by intra and inter faculty colleagues in tertiary settings. Discussions ensue, papers are written, books are published, politicians and educational system deliveries generate policies and relevant newspaper articles spark interest. However, research findings and attendant policies are not developed and implemented quickly enough to satisfy the day to day program demands of principals, teachers and their school communities. Nor are they generated in formats appealing to the pace and intellects of modern societies. Print is important but has lost its pre-eminence in modern communications. Our attitudes to the influence and importance of multimedia to explicate and embed cutting edge research in Educational policy and practice need to be revised and quickly! Using the CYBERTEACH framework linked to generic government policies and accountability mechanisms, this paper and its related workshop demonstrates how multimedia is/can used in universities and shared with linked partner schools to facilitate rapid recording and transfer of new knowledge. Of particular interest to practicing teachers, it demonstrates that assessment and accountability measures can be tied to system performance scales without contributing unintentionally to the production of school league tables and narrowly focused student achievement outcomes.

Keyword: promotion accessibility

N, O. P, Q, R

RI05001Y
On the Internationalization of Educational Research

Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois

Much has been written in recent years about internationalization of higher education, focusing mainly on how universities can be internationalized through recruitment of international students; transnational programs; study abroad and educational exchange; and the internationalization of curriculum. Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which, in an era of global interconnectivity, research might also need to be internationalized. In this paper, I want to argue that international and comparative research already play an important role in the development of educational policies at the national level, often in ways that reproduce the legitimacy of neo-liberal agendas; and that to counter the efficacy of this research, critical scholars need to understand the hegemonic relationship between 'top-down' research produced by international organizations such as the OECD and the World Bank and its national and local 'take up'. Moreover, critical scholars need to explore how 'bottom up' international collaborations might be possible and carried out in education.

Keywords: Directions in educational research policy

S

SH05019Y  
A dialogic framework for research into educational change

Glenda Shopen, Pauline Taylor and Jacinta Morseu, James Cook University

Current research undertaken by education departments into professional development programs for teachers relies heavily on participation rates rather than take-up (impact). These are often the only performance indicators required under publically funded programs. Individual deliverers, such as, educational advisers and university lecturers also tend to measure what has been perceived as most effective or likely to be taken up by teachers through evaluation questionnaires and reported intentions for change at the conclusion of the program, the last point of contact. In this paper we argue that ongoing dialogic inquiry supported by interview, critical discourse analysis and teaching support provides a more adequate framework for measuring impact and implementation of innovation. This is particularly crucial for practitioners in remote contexts where opportunity for supportive professional dialogue is restricted and opportunities for multi-voiced research are rarely enac ted. Furthermore, we propose that an ongoing dialogic framework for research involving educational innovation provides the best chance for remote communities to access information and participate in cultural discourse in a public domain to effect sustainable educational change. The paper is based on four years of inquiry into professional development programs for teachers in Queensland.

Keyword: Features

SU05004Y  ®
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Who Are The Beneficiaries Of Our Educational Research?

Peter Sullivan, La Trobe University

Educational research can have an audience, beneficiaries, and casualties, and researchers need to make active decisions about each. This paper argues that it is more productive for educational researchers to conceptualise their work in terms of these decisions, rather than whether it adheres to the tenets and norms of some esoteric paradigm. Particularly in an era of greater scrutiny from practitioners and funding agencies, including governments, we need to be especially explicit about the beneficiaries. To illustrate both policy and practical considerations of such an approach, examples are given from both an educational research policy development exercise, and a currently funded classroom based research project.

Keyword: Promotion Accessibility

T

TH05016Y
Desperately seeking a solution: Living with/through the RAE

Pat Thomson and Andy Noyes, University of Nottingham

We are a four. Not a five. We are a four in a university in which two thirds of the schools are fives or five star. We were once a five, but in 2001, we slipped. This meant that overnight the school of education lost almost £400,000 of its annual income. We hear that the RAE in 2008 might be the last one and after that there will be some kind of metrics to measure performance. We suspect that this means that this coming RAE is our last chance to get back to where we were. It's now or never. But they've changed the scales. It's a one to four range now, and nobody knows how this lines up with the old six point scale.

Well that's one part of our collective identity/ies speaking. Other parts might note that we do not reject of the idea of some standards applied to research quality, that we would welcome something that put together teaching and research in ways that made sense to educators, that we support the idea that everybody in a university should research and publish.

In this paper we talk about everyday life in a four rated department. We discuss the ways in which we are approaching the with/against practices of increasing our research profile and productivity in a marketised and hierarchised university system. As a recently appointed Director of Research and as an early career researcher, we have different experiences of how we survive/thrive in a performative context, attempting to fabricate new/old identities and worthwhile and credible knowledges.

Keyword: Quality

THO05025Y  ®
PDF
From macro to micro: One model of implementing government policy into classroom practice

Jean Thompson, Wesley Imms and Sally Godinho, The University of Melbourne

Educational research and government policies have identified the need to address the engagement of boys in learning. Consequently, improving learning outcomes for boys involves several key strategies: those aimed at ensuring that boys are at school and actively engaged in learning, and those aimed at enhancing effective pedagogies by ensuring lesson content is relevant for boys and consistent with their preferred learning styles.

Of interest to this conference is the method of implementing such directions in a project that encompasses over 350 schools nationally. The DEST-funded Boys' Education Lighthouse School Stage 2 (BELS) Project has implemented an evidence-based approach that has enabled government, school administrators, teachers, boys and members of the wider community to develop quality strategies that allow for measurable outcomes and community ownership in areas such as literacy, gender and role models, learning styles, numeracy, ICT-supported learning, social competencies, and home and school partnerships. This presentation will use the BELS project to illustrate large-scale implementation of government policy that seeks to improve learning outcomes for boys in a wide variety of classrooms.

This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 1 CU05022Y Linking research on schooling, professional practice and educational policy.

U, V, W, X, Y

YA05012Y
PDF
Education policy research in the People's Republic of China

Rui Yang, University of Hong Kong

Since the latter part of the 20th century, we are experiencing a duality: on one hand the way policy is made is highly contextualized and its implementation is even more context dependent, on the other policy travels globally, widespread and profound. Under such scenario, comparative research on education policy studies in various countries is growing in relevance and interest. This paper, for the first time in the English literature, investigates how education policy is researched in mainland China. It attempts to understand how Chinese education policy researchers are influenced by external forces while struggling with the local relevance of their work. After a start with trajectory of education policy research in China, it shifts its emphasis to agenda setting to illustrate how the priorities of both the central and local governments are increasingly under the influence of the global, especially from supranational institutions including the World Bank, OECD and UNESCO. The paper then selects a few most influential scholarly journals in China's educational research to examine the current major themes to show their similarities and differences, as compared internationally. It ends with some discussions of the tensions between the global agenda and the local context.

YA05031Y KEYNOTE ADDRESS
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Is impact a measure of quality? Producing quality research and producing quality indicators of research in Australia

Lyn Yates, The University of Melbourne

Neither impact nor peer review nor addressing national research priorities, are unproblematically appropriate criteria for quality assessment in the field of education, but each is a player in current debates about quality research, and each is indicative of some competing agendas that thread through current quality research re-assessments in Australia. This paper discusses some conflicting agendas and trajectories within recent Australian research policy and funding mechanisms for education, as well as the broader context of the status of education research and how this impacts on debates and strategies with regard to quality. It is argued that the education research community do need to develop appropriate quality indicators in the field of education, but to do this effectively requires attention also to the contextual pragmatics and politics of how such assessments will be enacted; and it is also important that the current focus on measures of quality assessment be re-coupled with more attention to contexts of production of education research and the issue of how quality research can be developed.