Con el apoyo del Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) del Reino Unido se ha estudiado cómo evaluar –y a qué estándares sujetar– a la investigación educacional.
Ver más abajo dos documentos producidos con el apoyo del ESRC y un resumen de ellos.
Este es un tema al que hemos prestado atención en varios postings debido a la importancia que reviste para las políticas de promoción de la investigación en las ciencias sociales en Chile:
— Una iniciativa digna de estudiar: investigación aplicada a las políticas públicas, 24 agosto 2009
— La investigación educacional en Chile: Una aproximación bibliométrica no convencional, 11 junio 2009
— Investigación educacional, conocimiento y políticas, 14 abril 2009
— Índice-h de universidades chilenas líderes en investigación y su relación con rankings basados en la percepción de su prestigio, 6 marzo 2009
Resumen
There is a growing interest in the potential contribution of research to the development of a wide range of polices and practices in education. This has led some to question the appropriateness of existing ways of judging research quality, including those used in the Research Assessment Exercise. Researchers from the Oxford University Department of Educational Studies have sought to clarify what we mean by applied or practice based research and to develop an appropriate framework within which to assess their effectiveness.These are their key conclusions and policy implications.
■ Traditional barriers between pure theoretical research and applied research in education are being broken down. Furthermore, there is a growing demand from government and other agencies that research should help to stimulate and help to spread new approaches to educational policy and practice
■ Existing definitions of practical research are too descriptive and existing models that seek to mesh the theoretical with the practical may be too simplistic. The researchers suggest that ‘applied and practice-based research’ can best be defined as ‘an area situated between academia-led theoretical pursuits – such as historical research – and research-informed practice.’ They see this as consisting of many models of research ‘explicitly conducted in, with, and/or for practice’.
■ Existing quality assessment mechanisms – despite changes to the Research Assessment Exercise – may not be appropriate measures of the effectiveness of applied and practice-based research.
■ A multidimensional understanding of quality should be developed which combines methodological and theoretical robustness with the potential value of research in classrooms and other practical (and policy-making) settings; its ability to engage and stimulate practitioners in their own practice; and is value for money. This is the starting point of a new framework for the assessment of applied and practice-based research in education.
■ The researchers identify several potential subsidiary aspects to each of the four dimensions in their new framework, but they caution that not every research project will have the same aims or audience. Those seeking to develop performance indicators or thresholds from the framework will therefore need to adapt it to different circumstances.
Boletín del Economic and Social Research Council del Reino Unido Assessing quality in applied and practice-based educational research (2005): bajar aquí 343 KB
Research Report Assessing Quality in Applied and Practice-based Educational Research A Framework for Discussion de John Furlong and Alis Oancea, Oxford University Department of Educational Studies, 2005: bajar aquí 277 KB