Lyn Yates is Foundation Professor of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne and the author of What does good education research look like? Situating a field and its practices (Open University Press 2004). Lyn has worked extensively in education studies, women's studies and education research at three different types of Australian universities, and has had visiting fellowships in a number of other countries. She is a past President of AARE, a past member of the ARC College of Experts, and has taught postgraduate research courses, supervised and examined many theses, edited journals and books, worked on consultancy projects, served on steering committees, led research groups and been Associate Dean Research in an education faculty. Her own research has included a range of methodological activities, including discursive and critical scholarship; sociological, feminist and post-structural engagements; and qualitative, longitudinal, ethnographic, textual and interview-based empirical studies related to social change, identity, inequalities and education.
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.
Dr Adrienne Alton-Lee is the Chief Education Adviser for the New Zealand Ministry of Education's Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis (BES) Programme. Her role is to strengthen the evidence-base informing policy and practice in education and to provide medium term strategic advice to government.
Dr Alton-Lee was formerly a teacher, classroom researcher, Professor of Teacher Education and an Associate Editor of Teaching and Teacher Education. She has published in a range of leading educational journals including the Harvard Educational Review. She is author of the Ministry of Education's Quality teaching for diverse students in schooling: Best evidence synthesis www.minedu.govt.nz/goto/bestevidencesynthesis.
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
John Furlong is Director of the University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies and Fellow of Green College Oxford. After teaching in a London comprehensive school, and a period as research fellow at Manchester and Brunel universities, John Furlong moved to Cambridge University where he was a lecturer in the sociology of education for 11 years. In 1992 John moved to Swansea University to take up his first Chair, and later held chairs at Bristol and Cardiff universities. He took up his current post as Director of the Oxford University Department of Educational Studies in 2003. He is currently President of the British Educational Research Association and is a member of the 2008 Education sub-panel. In 2003 John was elected as an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.
John has a long standing reputation for research and teaching in three fields: the professional education of teachers, learners' perspectives on their own learning, and, of particular interest to this conference, educational research capacity. In 2001 he undertook a major review of educational research capacity in Wales, and has recently completed a research project on behalf of the ESRC examining quality criteria in applied and practice based educational research.
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 higher education 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.