Learning Research Programme Research Articles

Improving schoolteachers' workplace learning

This paper is set in the context where there is a policy emphasis on teacher learning and development in a number of countries as a means towards school improvement. It reports on a longitudinal research project about the workplace learning of English secondary school teachers, carried out between 2000 and 2003. This was part of a Teaching and Learning Research Programme network of projects looking at learning in a variety of workplaces. The paper contrasts some key features in the teacher development and workplace learning literatures, which highlight different understandings of learning—as acquisition, participation and/or construction. We argue that insights from the literature and the research, including insights from other projects in the network, enhance our understanding of teacher learning. The paper describes some of the main ways in which experienced teachers learn, and then identifies three dimensions which interact in influencing the nature of that learning. The dimensions are: the dispositions of the individual teacher; the practices and cultures of the subject departments; and the management and regulatory frameworks, at school and national policy levels. Based upon the findings, we argue that current policy approaches to teacher development in the UK are over‐focused on the acquisition of measurable learning outcomes, short‐term gains, and priorities that are external to the teachers. They also assume and strive for impossible and counterproductive universality of approach. Instead, our findings suggest that teacher learning is best improved through a strategy that increases learning opportunities, and enhances the likelihood that teaches will want to take up those opportunities. This can be done through the construction of more expansive learning environments for teachers. We examine briefly some barriers to this approach, and give some suggestions of what could be done.

Researching learning outcomes: building confidence in our conclusions

The ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is expected to produce knowledge of high social scientific quality and practical pedagogic value. It faces, in a particularly acute form, the issue of how confidence in its conclusions can be built. This article begins with some conceptual clarification of the notion of a ‘warrant’ for research findings and distinguishes between warrants in social research and warrants for educational policy and practice. It then, in the specific context of research on learning outcomes, proposes an integrated model that recognizes the importance of, and relationships among, criteria associated with research design and empirical work, theoretical coherence, relationship with other research, and user affirmation. It concludes by emphasizing the need for continuing debate about, and development of, the roles and relationships of ‘researchers’ and ‘users’.

Importance and impotence? Learning, outcomes and research in further education

One of the defining features of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme is that it ‘aims to improve outcomes for learners of all ages in teaching and learning contexts across the UK’. This article argues that, although it is possible to use the terms outcomes for learners and learning outcomes interchangeably, they have an important difference in connotation. Particular meanings of the latter term are dominant within the Further Education sector. Some insight from analysis in the TLRP project Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education is presented to illustrate this difference and to underline the necessity for educational research to engage critically with both outcomes for learners and learning outcomes if it is to provide knowledge with a practical application.

Grasping the TLRP nettle: preliminary analysis and some enduring issues surrounding the improvement of learning outcomes

The ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is the largest ever programme of educational research in the UK. This article reports the purposes, processes, outcomes and issues arising from cross‐programme thematic work on the conceptualization of, and research into, ‘enhancing learning outcomes’ which is a key aim of the programme. Early documentation from thirty projects is analysed, especially in relation to a classification of learning outcomes, dominant metaphors of learning, sector differences and evidence of outcomes. Discussion focuses upon persistent issues concerning the assessment of the broad range of outcomes, what leads to them, and how knowledge of these links might be established.

Explorations in teaching and learning: a biographical narrative and some enduring issues

This article takes a broad, and somewhat personal, sweep across the last 30 years or so of educational history in the United Kingdom (UK)and highlights some of the challenges concerning research, policy and practice on teaching and learning which developed over the period. Issues associated with academic agency are considered and a narrative of the author's academic biography, particularly associated with primary education, is used to illustrate some of the dilemmas posed. The author's role as director of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council, the UK's largest contemporary investment in educational research, provides a particular context for this discussion. The article concludes that teaching and learning are always in ‘changing times’, but argues that many of the underlying issues are more enduring. It illustrates how history and biography shape the development of ideas, and how they pose questions and challenges for researchers at particular historic and biographical moments. The importance of cumulative synthesis of knowledge about key enduring issues, as generated through the biographies of each generation of researchers, is suggested.

Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses in Electronic Engineering: An Introduction to the ETL Project

This paper introduces earlier research into the effects of teaching on the quality of student learning and describes a large-scale project within the Teaching and Learning Research Programme of the British Economic and Social Research Council, looking at contrasting university subject areas, including electronic engineering. Subsequent papers present preliminary findings.

LINKING HOME AND SCHOOL MATHEMATICS: THE HOME SCHOOL KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE PROJECT

In this paper, we report some initial findings from the numeracy strand of the Home School Knowledge Exchange Project, which is part of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The overall aim of the project is to develop, implement and evaluate the impact of new methods of exchanging knowledge between home and school. The project has three strands, one of which focuses on enhancing numeracy at Key Stage 2. In this strand we are working with the teachers, children and parents of four primary schools, two in Bristol and two in Cardiff. The paper describes the knowledge exchange activities developed within this strand, and reports some initial findings and issues for further exploration. The nature of home mathematics, and its relationship to school mathematics, is discussed, and this is illustrated through the case study of a girl called Nadia. The paper concludes by discussing issues arising from implementing methods of knowledge exchange.

Transforming elarning cultures in further education

This article describes and explains the origin and approach of a major research project investigating learning in further education (FE). The Transforming Learning Cultures in FE project (TLC) is part of the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). The project is a partnership between four universities and four FE colleges. It takes a broadly social and relational view of learning, and explores the complex interrelationships between a wide range of factors, in 16 very varied ‘learning sites’. The article also introduces the other contributions to this Special Issue, and contextualises them in relation to the TLC project as a whole.

Educational research in educational practice [1

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), notably through its Teaching and Learning Research Programme, has laid strong claims to the benefits of research which leads to an enhancement of research capability. What it has not done is to make explicit what those benefits might be or how they might be achieved. The authors, with three others [2], are the directors of the ESRC-funded project Transforming Learn ing Cultures in Further Education (FE) (the TLCFE project). Among the aims of that project is the development of a lasting capacity among practitioners for enquiry into FE practice. To achieve this, the project team will first have to formulate a clear understanding of what educational practice is and, second, a view of the place of research in the support of that practice. This paper briefly describes the TLCFE project and then addresses three specific issues. Firstly, it distinguishes notions of educational practice. Secondly, it examines opportunities afforded by different approaches to researching educational practice. Thirdly, it returns to the central question concerning relationships between educational research, educational practice and professional, as distinct from technical, development. The paper argues that educational interests are best served by research in rather than simply on educational practice. Research in practice, properly construed and accomplished, offers practitioners a means of developing understandings of their practices and it is such understandings which are central to processes of achievement, enhancement and change in educational practice.

Theory, Research and Practice – The Problematic Appearance of ‘Pedagogy’ in Post-Compulsory Education

This article explores the problematic nature of pedagogy and pedagogic effectiveness in post-compulsory education – the politics of the discourse, the challenges to pedagogic “old-think” by the new learning, and the methodological difficulties of measuring outcomes as attention moves from the theatre of instruction to the setting of application. It takes as its starting point a study commissioned by the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme to review and document the evidence base for pedagogic effectiveness in the different field of post-compulosry education. The article unpicks the many different reasons why the scope and framing of this study doomed it to a kind of failure, and why the TLRP's research agenda aroused the passions of many educational researchers outside the mainstream. Concerns centred on TLRP as a manifestation of the new research orthodoxy and its preoccupation with evidence-based research, and the limitations of this orthodoxy in engaging with innovative thinking about new forms of teaching and learning.

Teachers as researchers and teachers as software developers: how use-case analysis helps build better educational software

A series of government initiatives has raised both the profile of ICT in the curriculum and the expectation that high quality teaching and learning resources will be accessible across electronic networks. In order for e-learning resources such as websites to have the maximum educational impact, teachers need to be involved in their design and development. Use-case analysis provides a means of defining user requirements and other constraints in such a way that software developers can produce e-learning resources which reflect teachers' professional knowledge and support their classroom practice. It has some features in common with the participatory action research used to develop other aspects of classroom practice. Two case-studies are presented: one involves the development of an on-line resource centred on transcripts of original historical documents; the other describes how ‘Learning how to Learn’, a major, distributed research project funded under the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is u...

The ESRC teaching and learning research programme

Children & SocietyVolume 16, Issue 3 p. 206-210 The ESRC teaching and learning research programme Charles Desforges, Corresponding Author Charles Desforges TLRP Programme DirectorateTLRP Programme Directorate, School of Education, Heavitree Road, Exeter EX1 2LU. E-mail: c.w.desforges@ex.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorJohn Kanefsky, John Kanefsky TLRP Programme DirectorateSearch for more papers by this author Charles Desforges, Corresponding Author Charles Desforges TLRP Programme DirectorateTLRP Programme Directorate, School of Education, Heavitree Road, Exeter EX1 2LU. E-mail: c.w.desforges@ex.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorJohn Kanefsky, John Kanefsky TLRP Programme DirectorateSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 March 2006 https://doi.org/10.1002/chi.714AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume16, Issue3June 2002Pages 206-210 RelatedInformation

The Gulliford lecture: Special needs in the twenty‐first century: where we’ve been and where we’re going

Alan Dyson, who last year gave the Gulliford lecture on which this article is based, takes a critical look at the relationship between ‘inclusion’ and ‘social inclusion’. He bases his analysis on a review of the history of special needs education and on some of the thinking which emerges from his work on a current research project, Understanding and developing inclusive practices in schools. This project is funded by ESRC (L 1392 51005) as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme and has been undertaken in collaboration with colleagues at Newcastle, Christchurch University College Canterbury and the University of Manchester. The later parts of this article refer to this project, although the views expressed are Alan Dyson's rather than those of the research team as a whole.

Subjective science and natural science.

D. B. Wiseman's (2000) claim that Kenneth Spence's human learning research program is an example of a subjective science derives from his misconception of the role of subjectivity in natural-science methodology. Natural science is suffused with subjective ideas, but the major consideration is not their subjectivity but whether they are designed to meet the objective standards of natural-science epistemology or some vague knowledge base that has no predictive validity. Within this context, Kenneth Spence, as his entire career reveals, was actively committed to the ideal that psychology should operate within a natural-science orientation.

Subjective science: Kenneth Spence's human learning research program.

This article examines Kenneth Spence's human learning research from 1949 to 1967. His works show the conditioning field to be in turmoil over basic issues during this time. These issues included whether determinism should be accepted, how to interpret a psychological test score, what psychometric properties a test should have, and how to use theoretical constructs. Turmoil occurred because behaviors and events had different meanings and degrees of importance to different investigators. Thus, what appeared as "objective" scientific change in the conditioning field was really the adaptation of personal preferences in word meanings, research goals, and research methods. These issues also indicate disputes about definitions and purposes of scientific activity during Spence's era.

Subjective science: Kenneth Spence's human learning research program.

Subjective science: Kenneth Spence's human learning research program.

Evaluating an adaptive education program: Implementation to replication

A four-stage approach to the evaluation of an instructional program is presented in this study. Measures are used to assess the implementation of the Learning Research and Development Center's adaptive education program in 52 second-grade classrooms. These measures provide a description of the program in situ and permit three issues to be approached: (1) to contrast specific dimensions of the instructional model as they are implemented in rural versus urban settings and in predominantly black, white, or integrated school districts; (2) to use these data to explain differences or similarities in achievement results on standardized tests; and, (3) to compare how the program was implemented from one year to the next over a two-year period and contrast the explanative power of the process variables from one year to the next.