Pedagogical Research- Who, when, what why and how?

This post is intended as a brief introduction to, and to prompt thinking about, the subject of pedagogical research in higher education,  in advance of the Learning and Teaching in Higher Education tweet chat on Wed 19th March 8-9pm GMT. Follow #LTHEchat and @LTHEchat.

Lecturers in higher education are subject matter specialists, employed to both conduct research and to teach a particular area of specialism. As experts, our approach to research is of course rigorous, scientific and evidence based. I believe our approach to teaching should be the same.  Teaching is often viewed as more of an art than a science, but if research exists that a certain approach is beneficial, then we should pay attention to it, and if there isn't then we should seek to find out.

Created by Simon Rae @simonrae

This evidence based approach to education has attracted a lot of attention recently, particularly through Ben Goldacre's recent paper Building Evidence into Education, published through the UK’s Department for Education 

When lecturers take teaching seriously (and many do), they reflect on their own practice and they embrace evidence based pedagogies, be that active learning, peer-instruction or the flipped classroom - in short they, and their students,  benefit from the latest advances in pedagogical research.

So one question is: who is it that does this research – or rather who should be doing this research?  Should it be educational specialists who know about education, but perhaps not the specifics of the subject being studied? Or should it be discipline experts, who know the details of the subject area, but perhaps don't feel that they have the time or the expertise?
 
Do lecturers already do pedagogical research without realising it? Certainly many lecturers, particularly those interested in teaching, are not afraid to bring their own innovations to the classroom – they adapt practices that have been shown to work in one subject area, to their own discipline, they introduce new types of assessment, or new ways to use technology in the classroom. In many cases lecturers will evaluate the success of these innovations using standard measures, such as exam results.

So what is the difference between this and pedagogical research?

I think the main difference is in the aims and intent. As with subject specific research, pedagogical research involves defining the research question in advance, thinking about the research design, analysing the data, determining the conclusions/implications and disseminating them. This is exactly how we approach our subject specific research, but less often how we approach our teaching.

Taking a more research oriented approach to teaching can have numerous benefits for the individual teacher; as a way to monitor and to reflect on the effect of their own teaching. But the most benefit is gained if the data is discussed, critiqued and shared more widely - perhaps with institutional colleagues, perhaps with others in the discipline at other institutions, at education oriented conferences (any physicists or chemists reading this, do consider coming to VICE-PHEC 2015 20/21st August!), or even through publishing in recognised journals.

As teachers, it is our aim to deliver high quality teaching, and we benefit from the pedagogical research that others have done. Perhaps we should also consider contributing our own innovations, experiments and findings to that knowledge base, so that others may benefit from our findings.

One approach that is accessible to teachers, which is not too onerous and which prioritises the teaching is action research. This is a useful introduction. The Journal of Applied Education Research, set up by Glen Gilchrist has just recieved kickstarter funding to provide a forum for this type of research.

For those in the sciences the 'Getting Started in Pedagogic Research within the STEM Disciplines' is a good place to start. Edited by Michael Grove and Tina Overton, from the University of Birmingham

And SEDA (the staff and educational development association) have a guide to pedagogical research in higher education.  

 Image Jared Tarbell  on flickr (creative commons)

Pedagogical Research- Who, when, what why and how? by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.