Teacher-Led Research E-Book

Richard Churches

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Please note: due to the tabular nature of some of the content, this ebook is best viewed on a larger screen. Teacher-led research can transform practice and enhance attainment and school improvement. Teacher-Led Research by Richard Churches and Eleanor Dommett equips teachers with the essential knowledge to design their own classroom research projects. With knowledge of scientific method, teachers can conduct their own research into areas of particular interest in their classrooms, taking control of education research and using it to inform their practice. Teachers can, for example, assess the impact of different pedagogies and prove which strategies work, which can ultimately enhance learning and attainment for pupils and drive whole-school improvement. New and innovative approaches led by teaching schools (outstanding schools following the model of teaching hospitals) are beginning to apply the same approaches used in clinical practice to their school improvement focused research work. In Teacher-Led Research you will learn how to apply similar approaches within your own classroom and in collaboration with others across different schools. Teacher-Led Research is a how-to guide for teachers, whether they use the term evidence-based, evidence-informed, evidence-engaged or evidence-led to describe the way they think about the challenge of making a difference to the learners they teach. Richard and Eleanor take teachers through the process of designing, implementing and writing up a study, encouraging them to focus on how they could apply this to their own context and interests. Teacher-Led Research provides an introduction to scientific method and guides teachers from research question to hypothesis, covers designing experimental research and implementing a study, and introduces the statistical concepts needed to analyse and write up research, enhancing teachers' research literacy. Finally, it provides a guide to interpreting findings and writing up research. This is an essential guide for anyone wanting to conduct their own randomised controlled trials, carry out their own classroom-based studies, collaborate with other schools on projects or just better understand teacher-led research and what it could mean for their practice. This book will be of interest to anyone who is involved in school-level practitioner research, or who wishes to develop their skills in this area. It will also be of interest to teachers who are beginning university education qualifications.

Leseprobe

Praise for Teacher-Led Research

Rigorous teacher-led research has much to offer in helping to create an ambitious and accountable self-improving education system. Richard and Eleanor’s book offers schools a way to engage in research that is both compelling and deeply worthwhile.

Steve Munby, Chief Executive, Education Development Trust

This volume by Richard Churches and Eleanor Dommett is very carefully crafted to be of use to hardworking, busy teachers. The distinctive feature of the book is its enthusiastic promotion of a scientific approach, drawing on experimental and randomised controlled trial methodologies in particular. The authors’ big achievement is to convey the necessary understanding of what can be dry and technical matters with humour and passion.

Ian Menter, Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education, University of Oxford, Former President of the British Educational Research Association

Teacher-Led Research will be of interest to anyone who is involved in practitioner research in schools, or teachers and schools who wish to develop their knowledge and skills in this area and extend their research-based repertoire of tested practical approaches. It contains a wealth of practical examples which are interesting, sometimes even challenging, but then this is exactly the point. Are you brave enough to put your beliefs and assumptions about what is effective to a rigorous test?

Professor Steven Higgins, School of Education, Durham University

Teacher-Led Research gives readers the tools to conduct real research within schools and begin the process of taking a scientific approach to finding out what really works. I’m really impressed with the clarity of Teacher-Led Research. It is clear, concise and practical and contains a small library’s worth of information. Complex concepts are explained in such a way that they seem easy. What more could you want? Churches and Dommett have distilled the key tools for education research. The impact on teachers and schools could be remarkable.

Paul Kelley, Honorary Clinical Research Associate, Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi), University of Oxford

Teacher-Led Research was very useful in consolidating my understanding and gave me a good grounding in what I needed to know before I started my own research. For anyone who is looking to prove that the techniques they are using in the classroom work, this is a great book.

Dave Ashton, Lead Practitioner of Mathematics, Bishop of Llandaff C.I.W. School

This is a great book for teachers and school leaders who are interested in RCTs and want to apply these techniques in their own schools. As well as providing relevant and practical examples, you are encouraged to design and develop your own RCT as you progress through the book’s chapters. Teacher-Led Research is accessible, well-illustrated and informative – highly recommended for those engaged in, or planning, school-based research.

Dr Jane Doughty CBE, Education Consultant

Teacher-Led Research is more than just a how-to guide for teacher-led research. It offers a pathway for whole school improvement using evidence-based practice. Teacher-Led Research allows us to work out not only what does work but, crucially, what doesn’t work, so that what we do as practitioners has a positive impact on children’s learning.

James Siddle, Head Teacher, St Margaret’s CE Primary School, Research Lead, Kyra Teaching School Alliance

Teacher-Led Research will be equally useful to the inexperienced teacher–researcher and the more experienced leader guiding a group. I never thought that I would spend my Saturday evening reading about inferential statistics but found the explanations here much more accessible than in standard texts. Even if you think you have a reasonable understanding, there is much to learn from this book.

Liz Samuel, Head of Sixth Form, The Queen Katherine School

Teacher-Led Research is a very user-friendly book which communicates what could be some rather stuffy maths behind the processes. The book has the appeal of an academic read, but put in an understandable way. It will appeal to the teacher who wants to quantify a ‘gut feeling’.

Rob Wilson, Assistant Head Teacher, Llanishen High School

Contents

Title PageForeword by Dr Ian DevonshirePreface:40,000 Faradays – new directions for education researchRandomised controlled trials in educationGetting the most out of this bookList of FiguresList of Tables1 An introduction to scientific methodScientific methodApproaches to researchResearch ethicsTest yourself 1What next?2 From research question to hypothesisPerfecting your research questionIndependent variables and dependent variables – thinking like a scientistOther variables to considerWriting your hypothesisTest yourself 2What next?3 Designing experimental researchLearning the subject that is experimental designYour starter for tenBetween-participant post-test designBetween-participant pre- and post-test designWithin-participant designMatched pairs designAdvantages and disadvantages of different designsWhat is a randomised controlled trial exactly?Non-randomised controlled trialsIncluding a third condition in your designTest yourself 3What next?4 Implementing your studyTurning your design into successful researchParticipant effectsExperimenter effectsRandomisationTypes of randomisationPutting your research into actionCreating a research protocolTest yourself 4What next?5 Statistics – here comes the mathsAnalysing your data – descriptive statisticsAnalysing your data – inferential statisticsEffect sizeDifferent inferential statistics and how they workUsing inferential tests to assess the effects of a potential confounding variableEstimating sample size before you implement your studyTest yourself 5What next?6 A basic introduction to the most frequently used inferential statisticsWhat is and what is not in this chapterHow this chapter is organisedDesigns with two levels to the independent variable and a post-test onlyTypes of data in focusThe tests that are usually used for a post-test only design with two levels to the independent variableSummary of the inferential tests we have told you about so farPre- and post-test designs with two levels to the independent variableCalculating the p-value in a pre- and post-test design where you have two levels to the independent variableDifferent effect sizes for different situationsTest yourself 6What next?7 Interpreting your findings and writing up your researchApproaches to reporting your resultsWhat to include in your write-upResults sectionReferencing in your write-upTest yourself 7Concluding remarksTest yourself answersGlossaryCopyright

Foreword

There was an excitable atmosphere in the packed-out Attlee Suite on the first floor of Portcullis House, the large Gothic Revival parliamentary building adjacent to the Palace of Westminster. None of the utilitarian rooms in Portcullis House, built in 2001, have the gilded finery of the old rooms in the Palace, but this didn’t dim the enthusiasm or energy of the occupants on a sunny late spring morning in 2007. Present were a mixture of enlightened parliamentarians, scientists, teachers and representatives from national charities and funding agencies. The occasion was the first public meeting of a pioneering All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) that had been recently convened by Baroness Susan Greenfield (Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University) to debate and promote the importance of scientific research in learning and education. In attendance were stakeholders from many different sectors and backgrounds, united by the common goal to better understand and disseminate best practice in education; to truly understand ‘what works’. The meeting marked a milestone in this initiative by building important networks and opening up new lines of communication between sectors.

Attendees included Eleanor, a highly skilled laboratory scientist and lecturer I had known for some years who was just stepping into the world of education policy, and with whom I would later join forces to coordinate the APPG. It was at this meeting that I first met Richard, an enthusiastic former advanced skills teacher, ever-present figure in contemporary education debates and a principal adviser at CfBT Education Trust. In the closing moments of the meeting, Richard raised a vitally important issue upon which the essence of Teacher-Led Research is based: that scientists and teachers need to work closely together and learn to use a common language if a rigorous evidence base for what works in education is to be achieved.

In the eight year journey since that first public APPG meeting, much novel research has been undertaken – some examples of which you will find within the pages of this book – and networks between stakeholders have grown in parallel with our understanding of how the best teachers teach. But although much progress has been made there has arguably been negligible impact upon classroom teaching practices. One unavoidable reason for this is that the results from some research studies simply take time to come to fruition. Another reason, however, is the impact of top-down policy decisions and the sweeping changes they can have on teaching priorities, seriously limiting the time available for teachers to engage with research. These changes in policy have occurred unusually frequently since 2007 as a result of three different prime ministers and four ministries. But herein lies the golden opportunity in education research: by collecting evidence for what truly works in the classroom, policies can be rebutted that have no evidential basis and, by working with parliamentarians, new policies launched on the back of sound experimental data. I wholeheartedly agree with the statement of former Education Secretary Baroness Estelle Morris in the 2007 APPG meeting, on the subject of making such changes, that ‘the answer has to be to get teachers doing research’, but I would go further to suggest that the next part of the journey needs to be led by teachers.

Teacher-Led Research is a unique and timely publication that provides precisely the information necessary to enable teachers to undertake their own classroom research. Richard and Eleanor are ideally suited to this task and have drawn on knowledge built from their classroom experiences, the design and delivery of countless workshops on how to design experiments, their own original research and many years coordinating large collaborative networks in the education sector. Employing a ‘practise-what-you-preach’ approach, a comprehensive account of how to perform your own classroom experiments is provided in clear, easy-to-understand language in a series of logical steps. Not only is Teacher-Led Research an indispensable guide for any teacher wishing to test what teaching practices are most effective, but this book will also tell you how to easily and effectively communicate these findings to your colleagues – a vital additional step in order to contribute to a growing national body of work.

Dr Ian Devonshire, PhD, CSci, FRSA, Nottingham University Medical School

Preface

40,000 Faradays – new directions for education research

This book begins with high hopes and even greater aspirations. As we write this, the first 100 teacher-led research projects employing scientific method are concluding. Many of these are taking place in teaching schools in England (an initiative that began in 2010/2011 with the aim of paralleling the role of teaching hospitals in medicine – institutions where high quality research underpins outstanding training and patient outcomes in a way that models best practice for the system as a whole). Teachers in Wales and Dubai have also successfully shown that they can lead research using scientific methods, analysing and interpreting results with skill and accuracy, as evidenced in the publication, Evidence That Counts – What Happens When Teachers Apply Scientific Methods To Their Practice.1

The journey to this point has developed from collaborative work between scientists and teachers through to teacher-led initiatives. Both Richard and Eleanor (with Ian Devonshire) were involved in one of the first educational studies to use experimental research in England – a project led by Susan Greenfield and funded by the CfBT Education Trust (now the Education Development Trust) that began in 2009. Back then things were very different, and engaging and explaining scientific method and experimental research to teachers was much more time consuming as they had few frames of reference to draw upon. Nonetheless, the teachers’ enthusiasm carried the three-year project through to its final successful conclusion.2 The project fed into the House of Lords All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education and featured as part of an event on Neuroscience in the Classroom at the British Science Festival in 2013.

Through these various initiatives, and over many years, it has become clear that teachers have a great appetite for learning about experimental research design, and the desire to use such methods both to conduct their own publishable research and as a tool in achieving school improvement – a fact evidenced by the successful work of the Education Endowment Foundation in England and the wide range of randomised controlled trials that have taken place around the world in recent years.3

The original project in 2009 worked with teachers on a study designed by scientists but over the years the dynamics have changed. Now teachers design and run their own studies. This approach began with Closing the Gap: Test and Learn, a Department for Education and National College for Teaching and Leadership programme which pooled 200 teaching schools together with 700 other schools to collaborate on the design and implementation of education research using scientific method.4 As part of this programme, Richard travelled around England training teachers in how to implement this kind of research. He effectively taught them the kind of introduction to experimental research design that would be taught to psychology students, with no greater intention than helping teachers to get an understanding of this style of research.

Within a few weeks, a teacher in the north-west of England (Liz Samuel) conducted the first experimental study with her A level students. From this initial study enthusiasm grew within the group of teachers. It soon became apparent that with training in scientific method, teachers could conduct their own research into areas of particular interest in their classrooms, taking control of education research and putting it at the front line, so to speak.

This is what happens when people learn about scientific method. Indeed, if we look back at the history of science and how scientific understanding of the natural world developed, it is not a history of large pharmaceutical companies, research grants or even necessarily university-led research (although often people who conducted studies had learned their skills within a university). Rather, the history of science is littered with the stories of enthusiasts who, applying a controlled scientific approach to a problem, discovered amazing things. Because they then shared their findings by writing up what they did, others could replicate their findings by doing the experiment again, so that scientific method and knowledge grew fast and in a way that was unstoppable.

Take Faraday, for example. Michael Faraday (1791–1867) had very little in the way formal education, yet he ended up as one of the most important and influential researchers in the history of science. Among his many achievements was establishing the basis for the theory and practice around electromagnetism, ideas and concepts that largely remain in place today, despite many years of further enquiry. What enabled Faraday to achieve this was method; using scientific method to be precise. This was combined with clear and straightforward experiments and the ability to communicate them in a way that made it easy for others to replicate his findings and build on his theories. If only 10% of teachers in England engaged in experimental research in this way, we could have 40,000 Faradays in education. Even if they produced only one important piece of trial evidence in their career, the effect and potential for replication could be truly transformational.

Randomised controlled trials in education

As we write this book, there is no doubt that evidence has come of age within the teaching profession. As a UK Cabinet Office paper, commenting on a particular type of experimental approach, put it in 2012, ‘Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the best way of determining whether a policy is working.’5

At the same time, the notion of the importance of teacher-generated school-based research is also centre stage. In many ways, saying this seems like an extraordinary statement, implying what is simply not the case – namely, that teachers and other education and public sector professionals have not been as diligent as they could have been. This, of course, is far from the truth. In fact, as Haynes et al. also note, if we look at evidence-based practice outside of teaching and in the wider public sector, it is instantly clear that this shift has occurred across a wide range of areas of public policy only recently. Indeed, the number of randomised controlled trials that have taken place in the areas of health, social welfare, education and crime and justice rose exponentially from virtually none between 1900 and 1959 (with only a modest number in the 1960s) to nearly 200,000 in the 1990s.6 This said, few of these were education related (unless conducted within the sphere of educational psychology). Thus, the change in thinking that has taken place in recent years within schools and education departments is in many ways a reflection of wider demands and a sort of ‘catch up’ on the part of those of us engaged in working with schools.

It is not, however, the place of this book to spend too much time debating or recording the history and development of the evidence movement in education. There are many other excellent discussions that explore the nature of being evidence-based or not – for those interested, we highly recommend Tony McAleavy’s publication, Teaching As a Research-Engaged Profession.7

Rather, this book is intended to be a ‘how-to’ guide for those already convinced by the arguments and debates, whether they use the term evidence-based, evidence-informed, evidence-engaged or evidence-led to describe the way they now think about the challenge of making a difference to the learners they teach. This book is therefore for people like us and the teachers we have worked with over the last few years – teachers who believe in and want to design research in their own schools and the schools they are associated with – research which taps in to the long history of scientific method and what it offers.

At the same time, it is important to recognise that a complex field of study such as education needs more than a simple reductionist approach. Therefore, at no point are we arguing for a shift to the exclusive use of the style of research we describe. Indeed, some education research questions would not be effectively answered in this way. Nevertheless, and we hope that this is now the case, perhaps people in the field of education can feel more comfortable in realising the value of experimental research design as part of a mixed methodology.

Getting the most out of this book

Although we have organised the book so you can dip in and out of it, we recommend that you read it from cover to cover in the first instance, completing the various activities as you go along. The reason for this is that each chapter builds on the next.

Alongside the main narrative, the book has the following features:

Glossary terms – All words and phrases that are key subject knowledge are indicated in bold the first time they appear. These terms can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.Brain boxes – These text boxes contain additional explanations, extended ideas or descriptions.Learning zones – These are short boxed sections that include a task to enhance your understanding.Test yourself – At the end of each chapter there are self-assessment questions that will help you to review your knowledge and remind yourself of the main topics that you have learned in the preceding section. You can find the answers to these questions at the end of the book.

1 R. Churches and T. McAleavy, Evidence That Counts – What Happens When Teachers Apply Scientific Methods To Their Practice: Twelve Teacher-Led Randomised Controlled Trials and Other Styles of Experimental Research (Reading: CfBT Education Trust, 2015). Available at: https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com

2 E. Dommett, I. M. Devonshire, E. Sewter and S. A. Greenfield, ‘The impact of participation in a neuroscience course on motivational measures and academic performance’, Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2(3–4) (2013): 122–138.

3 Professor Paul Connolly’s forthcoming literature review (previewed at the 2015 British Educational Research Association conference) indicates well over 800 university-associated RCTs have been conducted over the last 10 years.

4 The inclusion of experimental research training in this programme would not have happened without the innovative and forward thinking of Juliet Brookes and Robin Hall.

5 L. Haynes, O. Service, B. Goldacre and D. Torgerson, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials (London: Cabinet Office, 2012). Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/62529/TLA-1906126.pdf, p. 6.

6 J. Shepherd, ‘The production and management of evidence for public service reform’, Evidence and Policy 3(2) (2007): 231–251.

7 T. McAleavy, Teaching As a Research-Engaged Profession: Problems and Possibilities (Reading: CfBT Education Trust, 2015). Available at: https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com