Itslife - Learning for Teaching - Researching Skills

Teaching and Learning Themes

Research Sources and Techniques

see also infoliteracy; reference sources and overviews, portals, gateways

SUPPORT PAGES FOR RESEARCH PROJECTS | Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 |
These materials are intended to assist you in:

Working successfully through all stages of a workplace project.
Managing practical issues such as access, ethics, finding literature, maintaining the research timescale and using available support.
Improving your skills in data collection and analysis.
Writing up your project to meet the appropriate requirements.

Please use these pages as you need to. There is no need to work through all the sections.

KEY RESEARCH SOURCES

British Educational Research Association (BERA) The Aim of the Association is to 'sustain and promote a vital research culture in education', and the website provides members with details of events, publications and other services available to members of the Association; and provides visitors with an overview of some of the activities and aims of BERA, with an invitation to become members. http://www.bera.ac.uk/

Current Educational Research in the UK A really useful site for seeing just what's going on in research, described as follows:

CERUK is a database of current or on-going research in education and related disciplines. It covers a wide range of studies including commissioned research and PhD theses, across all phases of education from early years to adults. This website also provides regular themed reports on particular areas of research, as well as exemplars which highlight individual studies. These focus on research that is ground breaking or interesting in terms of methodology or topic area. The reports and exemplars are informed by research registered on CERUK. at http://www.ceruk.ac.uk/

DFCSF Research Website - has many relevant reports, summaries and briefs, with many recent reports available to download as full reports or research briefs. Not the easiest search system in the world, but persevere as there are many relevant publications. The publications section is at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/programmeofresearch/index.cfm?type=5

The main site is at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research
EducatiOn-line is a key part of the important educational information services managed by the British Education Index. It is an indexed, full text, electronic archive of conference and working papers in the field of education and training. You'll find items which are really up to date, by the best known people in the field, and available in full text ! The site also stores reports, policy and discussion documents and early research results of all kinds at : http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/

Google scholar is a major resource we can all make use of. It describes itself as follows:
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search

The National Foundation for Educational Research is an independent body undertaking research and development projects in all sectors of the public education system. It aims 'to gather, analyse and disseminate research based information with a view to improving education and training. http://www.nfer.ac.uk/

Scottish Council for Research in Education - has been supporting Scottish education through research since 1928. In broad terms, SCRE's functions are to conduct educational research of the highest quality and to support the use of research outcomes through the dissemination of findings. A good, user friendly site, with some useful research featured. http://www.scre.ac.uk/

South West Skills and Learning Intelligence Module (SWSLIM) exists to bring information and intelligence on skills and learning to policy makers and practitioners across the South West. http://www.swslim.org.uk/index.asp

RESEARCH SKILLS

See Information Literacy

Top Tips for research skills
Part of the BBC Key skills website, which is clear, user-friendly and really helpful. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/keyskills/extra/module2/1.shtml

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