Abstract
<p>This article reports on a systematic review conducted to inform the development of a professional teacher education programme for the foundation phase of schooling. The research question was: What do quality research studies identify as the components and/or characteristics of quality teacher education for the foundation phase programmes that allow new teachers to begin to teach for epistemological access. A search for systematic reviews on educational programmes related to foundation phase for initial teacher education was conducted for the period between 1980 and 2011. The researchers added Stage 0 as a fifth step to the traditional four-step systematic review process. Stage 0 or quasi-tertiary review allowed us to present substantive findings of the identified systematic reviews and to explore their methodological quality. From the initial 2876 hits (mostly health and medical studies), only 19 studies were related to the educational field. Only three of the 19 studies were finally accepted as eligible at Stage 0. None of the reviews directly addressed programme design but contained elements that were considered as useful when designing programmes. The present study makes it clear that there is a dearth of research on entire programmes related to initial teacher education for foundation phase teachers. </p>
Highlights
Much concern is expressed about the return on investment of research in education. Pring (2000) refers to investments to the tune of approximately $1 billion in the United States and approximately £100 million in the United Kingdom, but many believe that this money is not well spent
The assessment of the quality of the studies included is a crucial part of the systematic review process
For the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) (2009), the quality assessment of studies is the key: to assess the risk of bias in included studies caused by inadequacies in the study design, conduct or analyses that may have led to the treatment effect being over or underestimated. (p. 44)
Summary
Much concern is expressed about the return on investment of research in education. Pring (2000) refers to investments to the tune of approximately $1 billion in the United States and approximately £100 million in the United Kingdom, but many believe that this money is not well spent. Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003) share Pring’s concern about the usefulness of educational research as it pertains to providing practitioners and policy makers with better-informed and less speculative information for decision-making for practice. They refer to the U.S Department of Education’s Strategic Plan for 2002 and 2007 (2002), which insists on educational policies and practices being more evidence driven. Focussing on science and mathematics education, Yore and Lerman (2008) refer to the state of maturity reached by these disciplines, which does allow for the plethora of research results to be subjected to systematic reviews as is, for example, done in nursing education (Bowman 2007) to inform policy and practice. A systematic review is a mechanism to gather best evidence to inform such programme design
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