Promoting the Sustainable Improvement of Educational Empirical Research Quality: What Kinds of Collaborative Production Relationships Make Sense?

Yinqi Ma,Qi Xiu,Lingzhi Shao,Hao Yao

doi:10.3390/su14063380

Abstract

With the transformation of the knowledge production model, the research system of educational research is becoming more extensive, and academic collaboration has become an important productive method of promoting the sustainable development of educational empirical research. Given this situation, what kinds of relationships will sustainably improve educational empirical research output quality? Taking the influence of educational empirical research article as an example, we selected 4610 empirical research articles in 15 education journals for analysis, published between the years of 2015 and 2020. In the sustainable development progress of educational empirical research, the optimal scale phenomenon has been verified in cooperative research. Identity collaboration, institutional collaboration, international collaboration, and discipline collaboration were all found to have a strongly significant influence on the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research output quality. Meanwhile, the output quality of educational empirical research is affected by the heterogeneity of the number of cooperators and cooperating identities. These findings suggest that the optimal proportion of teacher–student collaboration should be 2–3, and the optimal scale of colleague collaboration should be 3–4. Compared with teacher–student collaboration, colleague collaboration, including cross-organization and interdisciplinary collaboration, was more conductive to enhancing the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research outcome quality. According to these findings, it is reasonable to believe that, in the process of the sustainable development of educational empirical research, fine-guidance-style teacher–student collaboration and small-scale, cross-unit colleague collaboration should be promoted; meanwhile, strengthening the collaboration between normal universities, optimizing the quality of international collaboration, and promoting pedagogy intersection with other disciplines are also critical to promote the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research outcome quality.

Highlights

In the era of big science, scientific research is characterized by large investments, multidisciplinary integration, and ambitious research goals [1,2]
Through conducting an informational exploration of 3610 educational empirical research papers published from 2015 to 2020, we examined the influence of collaborative production relationships in the field of Chinese educational empirical research on scientific research output in the sustainable development progress of educational empirical research and obtained several validated findings
According to the data analysis, scientific research collaboration can help improve the educational empirical research output quality, and an optimal scale phenomenon exists for collaborative research

Summary

Introduction

In the era of big science, scientific research is characterized by large investments, multidisciplinary integration, and ambitious research goals [1,2]. With the transformation of the knowledge production model, the traditional individual scientific research pattern cannot gradually produce sustainable high-level research outputs [3,4]. The method of producing scientific research is gradually transitioning to team collaboration. Academic collaboration has become the mainstream method of scientific production [5,6]. In order to realize a sustainable development of disciplines, obtain wider research foundations and equipment, and extend the academic network, most scholars tend to collaborate with others within or across disciplines. This behavior is reflected in the fields of science and engineering and in the humanities and social sciences [7]

Methods

Results

Conclusion