Practical implications of research findings

Even if a practitioner is persuaded of a research finding, he or she cannot act on this unless they are able to identify specific practical actions which might follow from it. e lack of more rapid and widespread influence on the practice of science education of ideas arising from research, such as Piaget’s model of concrete and formal operations, or the constructivist view of learning, has sometimes been attributed to the difficulty, for teachers, in seeing exactly what practical actions might follow from acceptance of the broad finding, or principle. Gail (a provider of CPD) expressed this very clearly in her interview:

[Research findings] can be a little on the impenetrable side. And if they are made accessible then the likes of me and ordinary teachers can get hold of them more easily. I think … theory is no good on its own. It is necessary and very important, but the question is, what do I do with it in the classroom? And if you don’t have that question answered, then it doesn’t influence you. It needs to be, so what do I do then? If this is it, how do I react? How do I do something differently with the children? If I haven’t got that anchor it’s difficult. [Gail, SEP, para. 368]

Gemma (a provider of CPD) made much the same point, when she commented:

It’s as if they [teachers] want someone else to do all the theory and then just tell them what’s going to work. ey want it translated. e teachers just want it distilled into what they should do, that will definitely make a difference. [Gemma, SEP, para. 229]

e issue of perceiving the practical implications of research findings was raised explicitly by the second polar statement pair used in the focus group discussion (see Figure 2.6). Apart from this instance, however, it did not feature prominently in focus group discussions. is might be partly a consequence of our choice of research vignettes with relatively clear practical implications. One, for example, was Budd Rowe’s study of the effect of wait time (vignette number 4). A high proportion of participants in all focus groups claimed familiarity with the results of this study and several indicated that they already used this in their teaching — though not all were aware that it was a research finding:

T: Yeah, number 4 [is convincing] which I actually do already. I find that that’s the best way forwards, I mean, waiting for a response. Some children are very hesitant to speak out to start with. And sometimes it’s better if you give a little bit of time to think. Maybe it’s a minute, maybe it’s two minutes, maybe it’s three minutes. […]

I: And were you aware that was something that you were doing in, yourself, that piece of research

T: at was something I would do, I mean I wasn’t aware of it being recent research, it’s

something that I do a lot of. [primary focus group 1, paras. 68-72]

In the interviews, specific research findings were identified as influences on their practice by just a few individuals with no experience of research — which necessarily limited the amount of discussion of the issue of identifying their practical implications. An example given by one teacher — about teaching control of variables — was seen as linking easily to current teaching emphases:

In terms of 11-16 work research by Lovell that I was exposed to, if you like, when I was training...about the intuitive control of variables, the fact that students perhaps up to the age of 16, the average student is unable to consciously control one variable, so that pervades a lot of work that I do when we’re looking at course work, experimental planning and that kind of thing.

[Richard, S1, para. 20]

Other comments, however, suggest less clarity in distinguishing between findings and their possible implications. Marcus, for example, argued that:

Research needs to be relevant to play a major role …something that I would think, ‘Oh yeah, I would like to do that! I want to do that!’ [Marcus, S2, para. 200]

Again, in this discussion, context was a factor which inhibited the adoption of research findings, one focus group member arguing that differences between teachers and schools meant that implementing practices based upon research findings was inherently problematic:

You’ve only got to look round this table, three completely different schools, three completely different teachers. I could think of teachers in my school that are so different from each other and we’ve got a whole range of learners that yes… I could imagine that there would be problems you know applying the research findings that have been done in one set of circumstances to a completely different set of circumstances. [secondary focus group 2, para. 585]

A rather different issue was raised by one interviewee, a practitioner who was not a teacher, when commenting on the influence of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) project. His comment highlights the long time scale of the research programme which eventually led to the CASE teaching materials:

And then suddenly we came through to the mid 70s…. I came across the first research findings which indicated that if you were doing Nuffield Chemistry then the materials we were placing in front of the children were inaccessible to all but 15% of the population. And it only improved to 25% of the population by the time you get to 16 years of age….. So that was having an impact upon me. But the people who made those findings were the people who became the CASE people. Because by the time they got to the early 80s, Shayer had come out with ‘Towards a Science of Science Teaching’, and then they worked further and came out with their findings in the late 80s and the CASE project was born round about 1990, wasn’t it, as something that the schools could go out and use. So that is a good example, because they made those findings

accessible and more widely known within the teaching force than probably anything that had gone on before. [Lawrence, SEP, para. 56]

e fact that a group of researchers took almost two decades, to articulate in detail a set of practical actions that might follow from research findings which they saw as important, suggests that identifying the practical implications of research findings is far from trivial. Hence, it may be expecting too much of individual practitioners to leave this step to them. e subsequent impact of CASE, and our own work on diagnostic assessment which has sought to translate research tools into usable items for the assessment of children’s knowledge and understanding of key scientific concepts, suggests that this ‘translation’ into practical actions may be essential for wider impact of research on practice. It is also surely a step in which researchers themselves need to be deeply involved — and to come to see as part of the research process.

Perhaps the most salient comment here is on the relative rarity of discussion on the practical implications of research findings. is reinforces our sense, discussed earlier, that the impact on practice of specific research findings, through practitioners’ direct knowledge of these, is very limited. Much more commonly practitioners would refer to the use of certain teaching materials or guidelines as a means by which research influenced their practice, or acknowledged their use of broad teaching approaches, such as ‘active learning’ or practical work. Although unable to point to specific research findings that supported these aspects of their practice, many teachers expressed their conviction that there ‘must’ ‘surely’ be research evidence that these ways of teaching are more effective than other alternatives.