 |
 |
Text Only | Contact NERF | Site Map | Disclaimer | ||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
About NERFThe National Educational Research Forum was an independent organisation. Its role was to oversee the development of a coherent strategy for educational research and its use.NERF consisted of a main Forum, a Development Group and an Executive Team. NERF also worked collaboratively with a wide range of partners in the education sector. Together, they aimed to identify and develop strategies that used the the best methods to enable research in education to flourish. NERF organised projects, seminars and workshops inspired by and engaging with it's partners. The outcomes of these can be found in NERF’s Working Paper series. These are available for downloading from this site. Strategic proposals presented to the Secretary of State in 2003 Introduction It is time to take significant steps forward in the conduct and use of educational research and many of the key players are ready to do so. The National Educational Research Forum has come to these conclusions based on its own deliberations and an external evaluation of its proposals. This document outlines proposals for such steps and is a basis for interested parties to associate with them. The central idea is to bring research into a close relationship with development and to orient both towards practical use. This idea is neither new nor radical but is certainly timely. An appetite for deeper understanding of teaching, learning and policy development is apparent from the classroom to the cabinet office. The limitations of current approaches have been analysed recently in both the UK and the USA and important similarities are beginning to emerge in both. Proposals The first proposition is that teachers, leaders of teaching institutions and people devising educational policies need a strong base of evidence to draw upon to inform their work. Good evidence already exists on some topics, but it is not generally formulated for use, readily accessible or connected together. Currently some individuals are aware of some evidence; in future it should be possible for the majority of education professionals, both in policy and in practice, to draw on evidence as matter of routine. The reasons why an evidence base of such quality is not yet available in education have been explored in several reports - see references at foot of document (NRC 2003[1], OECD 2002[2], NERF 2000[3]). They derive partly from the historically low level of attention given to the scientific basis of education within the policy world and partly from the incentive system that drives academic research funding. Taken together, these have not, to date, favoured the development of research that addresses priority issues in practice and policy – “use-directed” research. Today there is a real chance to remedy this. Research Centres and Programmes have been introduced in recent years that enable sets of projects to be organised on a coherent basis, addressing explicit, use-directed objectives. A centre has been established to introduce a more systematic approach to reviewing existing evidence (EPPI)[4] and a National Educational Research Forum (NERF)[5] created to develop a coherent strategy amongst the many parties to educational research. NERF is putting forward two broad strategic propositions. Firstly that some kind of structure be established that makes evidence accessible to practitioners and policy officials and provides guidance on assessing and using it. It will need to draw together evidence from a wide range of sources and make extensive use of e-communications. The second proposition is that additional ways of conducting research need to be developed to enrich the base of useable evidence. Research of this kind needs to be combined with development into D&R programmes that address current and future issues of importance for teaching and learning, its management and continuous improvement. Teams, comprising teachers and institutional leaders, policy developers and researchers from many disciplines would work collaboratively on priorities established by agreement across the communities involved. Activity in classrooms to act upon the results of research would be as important as activity to inform it. Such interacting D and R would generate new kinds of knowledge, for example on the use of ICT in learning or formative assessment, that would both improve practice directly and contribute to the accumulating base of evidence and theory. Ways forward The current state of connection between research, policy implementation and the development of practice needs to be strengthened. This has been recently attested in the UK and in other countries (NERF, OECD, SERP). A significant change is called for in the organisation of development and research and in the way evidence is used in practice and policy development. For such strategic change at national level, political and financial backing is a requirement for success. At the same time it will be both necessary and possible to build on existing practice to develop ways forward on the ground. For these two reasons NERF is adopting a two-stranded approach: strategic and developmental. Strategically, discussions are proceeding with ministers, officials and chief executives of funding organisations about longer-term change. The aim of these is to bring about commitment to the ideas sketched above and to secure adequate resources to act on them. Developmentally, a NERF Network has been created to help organisations work together on this agenda. Within this network, projects of various kinds are being undertaken to investigate new ways of working and to develop new thinking. For more information, see NERF Development Group, NERF Network and Current Projects. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||
