E-Research for Education

This blog complements the earlier blog Data repository for teacher education.

It's worth noticing that the need for a database for enhancing teaching and school leadership is one of the five core recommendations in the recently published Australian's Institute's for Teaching and School Leadership report “Teaching and leading for quality Australian schools” (Zammit et al., 2007, pp. 40-43).

“Much research has been conducted investigating the so-called ‘knowledge society’ in which knowledge production, knowledge transfer and knowledge networking have emerged as critical capabilities. However, as Fullan (2002) reported, historically schools have been weak at knowledge building and sharing. It is important to identify not only the data needed by classroom practitioners and school and system leaders, but also how best to engage educators and policy makers in collecting, using and sharing evidence to improve teaching practice and student outcomes. Moreover, through research the teaching profession can participate in shaping its own directions and contribute to the development of policy, practice and frameworks of excellence." (Zamitt et al., 2007, 40).

The report discusses five aspects related to the concept and design of the database:

1. Understanding and supporting knowledge transfer, so that research had a greater impact on the schools, teachers, education leaders and their capacities to apply and further develop this knowledge.
2. The need for a quality teaching and school leadership database, so that it supplemented, but not duplicated present databases and its possible uses.
3. Suggested database's content that covers: access to relevant information; current research and working papers; exemplars of best practice in audio, film, and written text online; development of an online community for professional exchanges; etc.
4. Encouraging engagement of education community to use, and contribute to, the database: deposit contributing exemplars; use interactive research database for performance appraisal and reporting; access to research reports, be able to identify areas requiring research and fill in these gaps.
5. Creating the database and maintaining the online environment: mechanisms to facilitate searching and how the database should operate and be maintained.

There is an obvious strong focus on research, access to, and dissemination of, research knowledge in the sketch of the Quality Teaching and School Leadership database. However, the vision of the Education Australia database is quite different from the ACDE vision. The former focuses on research results and resources, and gives less attention to ‘raw’ data, resource integration and interoperability (it is more a resource repository, not only a database), meanwhile the latter focuses on ‘raw’ research and administrative data and the integration of different datasets (thus, potentially it could provide more opportunities for secondary analysis and e-research). It's worth noticing, that these two ideas and databases complement each other; and in an ideal e-research world they could be integrated/interlinked and developed together.

References

• Zammit, K., Sinclair, C., Cole, B., Singh, M., Costley, D., Brown a’ Court, L. and Rushton, K. (2007) Teaching and leading for quality Australian schools: A review and synthesis of research-based knowledge. Canberra: Teaching Australia. URL
• Australia, House of Representatives (2007) Top of the Class. Report on the inquiry into teacher education. Canberra: House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Vocational Training.
• Fullan, M. (2002). The role of leadership in the promotion of knowledge management in schools. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 8(3/4), 409-419.