What is Educational Research? Lecture 1: The Nature of Educational Research MSc EdRes, 4th October 2010 Rupert Wegerif

Questions What is research? What is education?

Educational Research called to account 1996: 2801 Educational researchers in UK costing around 68 million pounds a year Was it well spent? Hillage (1998, DfEE) Tooley, 1998 (OFSTED) said NO! Problems were: –Quality (methods and ideology) –Organisation (fragmented) –Usefulness (not what government and teachers want)

Solution offered: the medical model Let ‘users’ decide topics of research Find out ‘what works’ Use medical research as a model Base practice on research and evidence

Issues with the medical model Is education like medicine? –But being a student is not a disease Is education a demand-led service? –But sometimes you need education to find out what your needs are Is education a technology of delivery? –Can you separate out the goals of education from the means to achieve them?

Values problem Education is not ‘indoctrination’ or even ‘training’ as it involves the ideal of an educated person. The question of what education is for is not one that can be avoided. Even when goals are fixed the educational question is not only ‘what is most efficient way’ but also ‘what is the most desirable way’ and what is ‘most educational way?’ Carr argues that the means of education also need to be educational in that they need to open up possibilities rather than close them down

Science problem What does it mean to say ‘what works’? Education never works the same everywhere and for everyone as it depends on interpretation of meaning in a dialogue ie it is a ‘complex adaptive system’ not a ‘closed system’ The only thing that is possible is to show ‘what worked’ once under certain circumstances Research then does not offer factual relationships between inputs and outputs but it can offer resources to teachers to help them make decisions in unique situations – e.g. it does not offer answers but helps us understand the context of the problems better and the options available

What is educational research? Research is ‘sytematic and sustained inquiry, planned and self-critical, which is subjected to public criticism’ [Either empirical test or judgement of evidence] (Stenhouse, 1981) ‘Research is educational to the extent that it can be related to the practice of education’ [e.g through theory, improved practice, critical evaluation or other] (Stenhouse, 1981) Education implies interventions and values: it is about changing things in order to make them better. Therefore it cannot be separated from debate about what it means to be ‘better’.

Some further questions Is educational discourse always a matter of interpretations in a dialogue or is it more a technical matter? Does the process of educational research itself need to be educational? & What does it mean to be ‘educational’? To ‘expand’ the mind in some way? To liberate? To transmit? Is educational research a special kind of research? Or is it a site for multiple types of research? How do we educational researchers account for spending government money?