Classroom-based Research and Evidence-based Practice

An Introduction

Keith Taber

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446291702
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

This refreshing Second Edition offers a helpful overview of educational research for those training to be teachers, or setting out on classroom-based research projects.

The book illustrates the nature and logic of the research process, and supports readers in critically evaluating the strengths and limitations of published studies.

Drawing on a variety of relevant examples, the book demonstrates each stage of the research process - including formulating research questions, selecting data collection techniques and deciding on approaches to data analysis - and usefully integrates each stage.

The new edition includes:

- an expanded treatment of data analysis

- new, discrete chapters looking at ethical issues, and at how teachers can research their own classrooms through the use of case studies

- discussion of research carried out by trainee teachers.

Clear and comprehensive, the examples included in the book demonstrate the range of topics that are suitable for research in the classroom and identify key factors for consideration when undertaking classroom-based research.

This book is essential reading for students, researchers, teachers and trainee teachers interested in doing research in the classroom.

PART I

Learning about educational research

This book is organised into three parts. This first part, learning about educational research, introduces key ideas that anyone who wishes to be informed about research in education should be familiar with. Chapter 1 considers the nature of teachers as professionals, and why learning from published research, and even carrying out your own classroom research, is nowadays often considered an integral part of both being a professional teacher, and of post-graduate teacher education. Then, Chapter 2 offers a taste of what educational research is about, by offering examples of the kinds of claims about classroom teaching and learning found in published research. As well as providing an overview of the scope of research, this chapter introduces some studies that will be used as examples later in the book, and gives the reader an opportunity to ask themselves about the kind of processes and evidence that would enable researchers to make the knowledge claims they do.

To those coming to study education from some academic fields – those where particular ways of working are well established and applied by all those working in the field – it may seem that educational research is an immature field. Certainly, the widely different approaches taken may seem catholic and eclectic, if not anarchic. However, the initially confusing range of research strategies is not an indication that ‘anything goes’ in education research. Different approaches to research are based on different sets of fundamental assumptions and beliefs about what research is capable of finding out. Any particular study needs to use an approach consistent with the underpinning assumptions the researchers make – and the reader needs to recognise (but not necessarily share) those assumptions to appreciate the status of the claims being made.

Chapter 3 explores this issue and offers a simple model to help readers new to educational research. Approaches to research in education can generally be seen as falling into two clusters that reflect two distinct traditions. It is important to appreciate this distinction, as researchers in these two different traditions are usually trying to develop very different forms of knowledge, and use different ways of going about this. These research traditions offer different types of findings that need to be understood and applied in different ways.

It is suggested in the book that thinking about and undertaking research takes places at three levels: the ‘executive’ level where the basic assumptions underpinning research are established, the ‘managerial’ level where a strategy is adopted and research is designed, and the ‘technical’ level where data is collected and analysed. In much classroom research the same person acts as the executive, the manager and the technician (often whilst being in the class as the teacher at the same time!), but it is important to recognise the different roles. Chapter 3 considers the highest level where the most basic assumptions are set out, and introduces the two main clusters of approaches (‘paradigms’) for undertaking educational research.

This issue is sometimes presented as some kind of paradigm war, with different researchers having fundamentally different views about how to do research. However, the approach argued here is based on a consideration of the nature of the specific research foci being studied. Research into school attendance patterns will be different from research into teacher beliefs about pedagogy or research into students’ second language skills, because attendance patterns, teacher beliefs and language skills are different kinds of ‘things’, and that has consequences for what kind of knowledge we are able to obtain about them, and how we need to go about acquiring that knowledge.

Chapter 4 moves to the next level, where some key strategies (‘methodologies’) used in educational research are introduced. Chapter 5 then considers the particular situation of the classroom teacher who is interested in undertaking enquiry into the teaching and learning in her or his own classroom. This chapter considers the strengths and weaknesses of different methodological choices, from the particular perspective of the teacher-researcher, and offers examples of the kinds of classroom studies possible for someone in this context. In particular, the chapter introduces examples of what teachers-in-training, new to classroom research, can achieve as part of their professional placements in schools. It is suggested that often case study offers a suitable approach for teachers interested in balancing a desire to explore or solve classroom issues or problems with the expectations of writing a formal research report for an academic course.

The second part of the book, learning from educational research, builds upon this introduction by exploring how teachers can critically read and evaluate research studies. The final part, learning through educational research, provides a guide for teachers or students setting out on their own classroom research projects. Here the ‘technical’ level of actually doing the research is discussed. That part looks at how to operationalise the basic ideas about research from Part I, through the collection and analysis of data, and how to report research (drawing upon the criteria used to evaluate accounts of research in Part II). Throughout the book I discuss examples from published studies to demonstrate key points.

Before looking at how we can effectively critique and carry out research, though, we need to get a basic understanding of the role and nature of educational research in teaching.

1

The professional teacher and educational research

This chapter:

• considers the nature of professionalism in teaching
• presents the notion that a ‘strong’ model of teacher professionalism is linked to the ability to both critique research claims to inform one’s own teaching and to carry out small-scale research to develop practice
• explains the importance of research to studying education at post-graduate level
• explains the rationale for the structure and style of the book.

This book provides an introduction to research into classroom teaching and learning. It is not a textbook on teaching and learning that draws upon classroom research, and so provides teachers with lessons from research that they should consider adopting in their own teaching. Such books exist (see the list of further reading at the end of the chapter), and are useful, but this book is as much about the nature and processes of classroom research as it is about the outcomes. The reader will find many examples of research findings considered in the following chapters, and a careful reader will learn a good deal about teaching and learning by reflecting upon these findings.

However, the book is as much about how teaching and learning can be explored through research as it is about what research has found. There are a number of linked, but distinct, reasons why a book for teachers, and those starting out on a teaching career, should have such a focus. These reasons are both principled and pragmatic.

On the pragmatic side, teachers, and especially students on courses of initial teacher education (‘teacher training’), are increasingly being expected to demonstrate ‘evidence-based’ practice, or ‘research-informed’ practice. Indeed, practitioner (teacher) research has become very common in recent years, so that in many schools it may be normal, or even expected, that teachers engage in research as part of their work (McLaughlin, Black-Hawkins, Brindley, McIntyre, & Taber, 2006). This tendency may well increase as senior managers seek to develop their schools through engagement with research (Wilkins, 2011). This book is designed to help teachers develop the skills for making sense of, and planning, classroom research.

On the more principled side, this move to require teachers to be research-savvy, or even research-active, may be seen as part of the development of teaching as a profession. Teaching has been referred to as a profession for a very long time, and has been (in general) a graduate-entry career for some years. However, professionalism is more than earning a living – the key feature of the professions is that they are self-regulating groups of professionals. In the English context, for example, it was as recently as 1998 that the government handed over responsibility for registration of teachers to the General Teaching Council for England, a body representing teachers, and having the power to debar them by suspending registration. Even then, registration depended upon being awarded ‘Qualified Teacher Status’ through the government’s criteria.

Incredibly, the English government decided to abolish this (supposed) professional body of teachers in 2012, and replace it with an agency that was directly controlled by the government ministry. This clearly brings into question whether teaching in England can really be seen as a profession, if its regulatory body is in the gift of an agency external to the profession itself. This suggests that despite any rhetoric about the professional standards and responsibilities of teachers, teachers in England are not trusted by government to be professional enough to regulate themselves, i.e., to be fully professional.

Despite this, the present book is driven by a view that teaching should be a profession, and that qualified teachers should have the status of professionals. Professionals have to use their specialist knowledge and their professional experience to make judgements of a kind that cannot simply be based on following lists of rules. Of course there are rules that teachers should follow, but to be an effective teacher one has to constantly make quick decisions relying on professional judgement in the myriad situations where there are no simple straightforward rules to tell you what to do next.

We would expect any professional to be well informed about developments in their area of work, and to follow guidelines for ‘best practice’. This is, of course, the case in teaching, but for many years we have seen what I would characterise as the ‘weak’ model of professionalism in teaching in this regard.

The weak model of teacher professionalism

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In this weak model, the teacher fulfils the requirement to follow ‘best practice’ without taking a major responsibility for exploring what that might mean. In this model (which, of course, is a caricature – but nonetheless represents the general pattern followed in the past by many teachers) teachers are told what research has found out during their initial ‘training’, and are updated from time to time – perhaps through courses or staff development days, but largely via centralised official ‘guidance’. In other words, the government commissions research, interprets it, forms policy, and issues ‘advice’.

In at least one instance, the case of the ‘National Strategies’ in England, one could be forgiven for thinking that the government issued enough guidance to allow teachers never to have to again think for themselves. That is, at least, if any busy teacher found enough time to study all the files, and booklets, and videos, and charts and sundry other material that were produced and distributed at great expense. (Much of this guidance was fundamentally sound, and well intentioned, but the sheer volume, and mode of dissemination, were more suited to keeping a store’s retail staff updated with the latest products than informing the professional work of qualified graduate teachers.) So in this model, the teacher teaches, but others (with more time and other skills perhaps) are given the responsibility to find out how they should teach.

Secondary science teachers, for example, were provided with a great deal of material about teaching science to 11–14 year olds, and much of this drew upon some of the vast amount of research into teaching that subject which is available around the world. Key points from the research were summarised into succinct bullet points suitable for being presented to teachers in development sessions, and translated for teachers into advice on how to teach topics and sequence material.

Question for reflection

Given that teachers are busy with preparing, teaching and assessing, and all the other work involved in carrying out their duties, is it not a good idea for the authorities to interrogate and interpret research to guide teachers in how to do their jobs more effectively?

I am not suggesting here that such attempts by government agencies at guiding teachers in their classroom work are completely inappropriate, but there are problems with such an approach. The first is in terms of that notion of professionalism. No matter how well meaning a government, and no matter how skilled its advisors, it is not the profession. If teaching is the concern of the teaching profession, then the profession should be taking the lead, not being told what to do. The government is of course a major stakeholder in education, but its agenda is inevitably political. Governments should act politically, but professions are meant to be independent and self-regulating.

A five-part lesson is right out

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There is, of course, a distinction between what governments require...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the author
• Foreword to the first edition
• Foreword to the second edition
• Part I Learning about educational research
• Part II Learning from educational research
• Part III Learning through educational research
• References
• Index