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This study examines the experiences of two teachers in a public charter school who implement action research in their classrooms. The study explored the key elements of professional development as well as action research and makes the case as to why action research is an effective tool for teacher development. Participants were selected based on having little teaching experience and familiarity with action research. The study examined the experiences of teachers who have had limited professional development as they use action research in their practices. Data for the study were drawn from interviews as well as researcher and participant journals.

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Implementing research-based practices in classrooms as a means of increasing achievement in mathematics for all students requires an understanding of many complex factors that influence classroom change. Situating the role of the teacher as critical to these efforts, teacher inquiry provides a theoretical framework from which to understand the importance of teacher-created knowledge in implementing new instructional practices. A teacher-researcher partnership may provide the support system for teacher inquiry to occur. This study investigated the effects of a research partnership on the implementation of research-based practices, specifically considering the views of teachers participating in the partnership, the differences in implementation based on interactions with researchers, and the features of the partnership that supported the implementation of new practices. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of secondary data was used to understand the experiences of twelve teachers who participated in a research partnership among a research-based non-profit, a national coalition of public schools, and two universities. Results from observation, survey, and interview data found teachers had a complex self-perception of their own roles in the teacher-researcher partnership including being a collaborator, a learner, and an agent of change. Additionally, teachers who interacted with researchers embraced the new materials and instructional practices more so than those who did not. Features of the partnership that were supportive of the implementation process included a focus on the teacher, evolution and responsiveness, and collaboration and integration. Implications for teachers, researchers, administrators, and others are discussed. / CITE/Mathematics and Science Education

Yes / Open research practices seek to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research. Whilst there is evidence of increased uptake in these practices, such as study preregistration and open data, facilitated by new infrastructure and policies, little research has assessed general uptake of such practices across psychology university researchers. The current study estimates psychologists’ level of engagement in open research practices across universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, while also assessing possible explanatory factors that may impact their engagement. Data were collected from 602 psychology researchers in the UK and Ireland on the extent to which they have implemented various practices (e.g., use of preprints, preregistration, open data, open materials). Here we present the summarised descriptive results, as well as considering differences between various categories of researcher (e.g., career stage, subdiscipline, methodology), and examining the relationship between researcher’s practices and their self-reported capability, opportunity, and motivation (COM-B) to engage in open research practices. Results show that while there is considerable variability in engagement of open research practices, differences across career stage and subdiscipline of psychology are small by comparison. We observed consistent differences according to respondent’s research methodology and based on the presence of institutional support for open research. COM-B dimensions were collectively significant predictors of engagement in open research, with automatic motivation emerging as a consistently strong predictor. We discuss these findings, outline some of the challenges experienced in this study, and offer suggestions and recommendations for future research. Estimating the prevalence of responsible research practices is important to assess sustained behaviour change in research reform, tailor educational training initiatives, and to understand potential factors that might impact engagement. / Research funding: Aston University. Article funding: Open access funding provided by IReL.

Yes / Mental ill-health is an escalating problem in higher education. Not only does this impact students’ ability to learn, it can lead to poor completion, with learners opting to withdraw from studies, even if attainment has been satisfactory. The aim of this study was to gain insight about perceptions of poor mental health from postgraduate research students in a diverse UK university and canvas opinion regarding how the University could improve this. A short, pragmatic survey with basic quantitative and qualitative responses was distributed. This was analysed by a team comprising the learning developer responsible for postgraduate researcher learning development, academics and a doctoral student. The study found that poor mental health was evident, with over three quarters of respondents reporting some experience of mental ill-health. We identified five areas in need of attention: University Systems, Supervisor Training, Well-being Monitoring, Building Networks, and Finance. Sources of University-based stress were finance, administrative support, and an environment where a perception that poor mental health was an expectation rather than a problem was experienced. Students preferred to access support outside the academic environment. This is the first study of its kind at a diverse, plate-glass UK university, to consider research student mental ill-health, with a staff-student team working with data, and the learning developer spear-heading changes across postgraduate research. These findings have already influenced university strategy, staff training, and induction practices. The synthesis of the five areas could be used to visualise where further work is needed to improve mental health in these learners.

Yes / Involving patients and the public in all stages of research has been the focus of the SHARED study. Patient and public involvement (PPI) is an important strategic priority for the Department of Health and funders such as the National Institute for Health Research. The aim of this paper is to describe the benefits, challenges and costs involved in setting up the research study with lay members as part of the research team. The study focused on developing service user-led recommendations for people with memory loss and their carers, on discharge from acute hospital to the community. Methods: This began with a discussion of an initial research idea with a lay group of carers and people living with dementia. Once funded, approval was sought from the Research Ethics Committee and NHS Trusts to conduct the research including the active involvement of lay co-researchers. Finally, to recruit, train and pay lay co-researchers in their role. Results: The benefits of PPI have included developing ideas which are important to people living with memory loss; support for PPI received from the funders and research ethics committee, high levels of interest from volunteer groups, and lasting enthusiasm from many of the co-researchers. Organisational challenges were met in the requirement for research passports and with payment methods for the co-researchers. Training was beneficial but incurred extra costs for repeated training days. Discussion: Overall the benefits outweighed the challenges which were overcome to varying degrees. The lay co-researchers gained membership of a study group and a beneficial partnership developed with the third sector. The biggest challenge was in overcoming the differences in approach to lay co-researchers between NHS Trusts. Organisational culture has been slow to incorporate PPI and this has not yet been fully addressed. It has the potential to delay the start of projects, affect recruitment time, incur extra research costs and disadvantage PPI.

Yes / The importance of involving members of the public in the development, implementation and dissemination of research is increasingly recognised. There have been calls to share examples of how this can be done, and this paper responds by reporting how professional and lay researchers collaborated on a research study about falls prevention among older patients in English acute hospitals. It focuses on how they worked together in ways that valued all contributions, as envisaged in the UK standards for public involvement for better health and social care research. The paper is itself an example of working together, having been written by a team of lay and professional researchers. It draws on empirical evidence from evaluations they carried out about the extent to which the study took patient and public perspectives into account, as well as reflective statements they produced as co-authors, which, in turn, contributed to the end-of-project evaluation. Lay contributors' deep involvement in the research had a positive effect on the project and the individuals involved, but there were also difficulties. Positive impacts included lay contributors focusing the project on areas that matter most to patients and their families, improving the quality and relevance of outcomes by contributing to data analysis, and feeling they were 'honouring' their personal experience of the subject of study. Negative impacts included the potential for lay people to feel overwhelmed by the challenges involved in achieving the societal or organisational changes necessary to address research issues, which can cause them to question their rationale for public involvement. The paper concludes with practical recommendations for working together effectively in research. These cover the need to discuss the potential emotional impacts of such work with lay candidates during recruitment and induction and to support lay people with these impacts throughout projects; finding ways to address power imbalances and practical challenges; and tips on facilitating processes within lay groups, especially relational processes like the development of mutual trust. / Funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme (Project Number NIHR129488).

In the past two decades the Swedish compulsory school for students aged 7 to 16 has undergone major processes of reform and change. On a structural level these have ushered in a new era with a fundamentally changed assignment for the schools and its teachers. In this thesis, however, it is assumed that the teachers as individual actors and as groups have agency to accomplish change and alter structures. The thesis has been written within a several years’ inter­active research project with teachers from three compulsory schools. Based on data created in the project on how new and changing groups and working groups within teachers’ work lead to an extended assignment, the study focuses teachers’ negotiation of professional identities regarding the entire work situation. Etienne Wenger’s (1998) social theory on identity, entitled “Communities of Practice”, is used to deepen the understanding of the data. In the framework of an interactive research project the overall aim of the thesis is to describe and analyze how teachers negotiate professional identities in compulsory school. The aim is also to describe and analyze teachers’ learning and development of knowledge in the project. The central research question is: How and about what do teachers negotiate professional identities in different communities of practice? By using the interactive research approach the goal has been to develop a democratic dialogue and learning processes together with the participating teachers. One ambition is to enhance the knowledge of teachers as co-researchers within research projects and as teacher-researchers at work in school. The fora of the interactive project were informal talks, dialogues for learning, individual interviews and focus groups. The results of the study show that teachers negotiate professional identities in a flexible expanding multimembership of communities of practice. As brokers of information and knowledge between and within communities of practice at school, and from various identity positions, the teachers negotiate overlapping identities. Memberships in communities for adults only are growing in relation to teachers’ work regarding the entire work situation. The study’s main conclusion is that teachers in the new era negotiate identities within a web of tensions between fragmentation and coherence of the complexity of the work in its entirety through the multimembership in communities of practice. The thesis proposes that an awareness of complexity is fundamental, and that such an understanding can be enhanced by the teachers by developing themselves as brokers and by their reification of boundary objects within a complex multi­membership. Analysis of data shows that teachers in the interactive project have had the opportunity to further develop competences to negotiate identities as teacher-researchers at work in school. Data from the project are moreover analyzed within the context of globalized and diversified structural changes such as decentralization, economic transformations, cultural standardization, the individua­­­­lized knowledge society and the reflective society. A conclusion is that teachers seem to operate within an increasing globalization of the teaching profession and towards identities as globalized teachers. / Lärare i en ny tid: Om kunskapsbildning mellan lärare och forskare

Por meio da análise de versões de textos redigidas por um mesmo sujeito ao longo de um período de onze anos, o quanto podemos compreender a respeito das vicissitudes envolvidas na aprendizagem da escrita do texto acadêmico? Essa pergunta norteou a investigação que deu origem à presente tese cujo objeto voltou-se ao percurso de escrita de um pesquisador em formação. Seu objetivo geral foi, a partir da análise de marcas de reformulação textual em versões de texto, discutir as particularidades do papel da escrita na formação de um pesquisador, papel esse intrinsicamente relacionado com a própria formação em curso. Tomando a psicanálise de orientação lacaniana como nosso principal arcabouço teórico, procuramos dar a ver como o pesquisador estabeleceu relação entre sua palavra e a palavra do outro, nas versões que escreveu para os textos que vieram a ser dois relatórios de iniciação científica, uma dissertação de mestrado e uma tese de doutorado. Com isso, quisemos dar a ver quais foram os pontos de virada pelos quais o pesquisador passou, em diferentes momentos de sua formação, para conseguir construir um lugar próprio para enunciar (RIOLFI; ALAMINOS, 2007). Nossa tese é aquela segundo a qual, por meio da análise das marcas visíveis e invisíveis de formulação textual (GRÉSILLON, 2007), podemos empreender construções em análise (FREUD, 1937) que nos permitem calcular, em nível cognitivo, como o pesquisador está superando os obstáculos epistemológicos que entravam sua reconstrução do conhecimento da modalidade científica (BACHELARD, 1996) e, em nível subjetivo, como, por meio das operações de alienação e separação (LACAN, 1964), colocou-se, emocionalmente, em posição de poder a vir construir novo conhecimento. Com relação aos objetivos específicos tivemos: 1) Analisar as marcas de reformulação textual em versões de texto redigidas por um pesquisador em formação; 2) Analisar, em versões de texto redigidos por um pesquisador em formação, a dinâmica do ultrapassamento de obstáculos epistemológicos em momentos que podem ser qualificados de pontos de virada (RIOLFI; ALAMINOS, 2007); e 3) Estudar a influência que as intervenções realizadas por terceiros (o orientador e colegas de grupo de pesquisa) em versões de texto têm no processo de escrita de textos acadêmicos. A análise de versões de textos permitiu concluir que o ultrapassamento dos obstáculos epistemológicos está ligado à possibilidade de o pesquisador em formação alterar a relação que estabelece com o conhecimento. Para tanto, ele precisa submeter suas impressões iniciais a uma rede simbólica, reformulando o que escreveu. / By means of the analysis of text versions written by the same person over eleven years, what can be comprehended about the vicissitudes related to the learning of the academic text writing? This question directed the investigation that resulted in this thesis which focus is the writing path of a researcher in training. Its general objective was, through the analysis of marks of textual revision in text versions, discuss the particularities of writing in the training of a researcher, being writing intrinsically related to the training ongoing. Taking Lacanian psychoanalysis as our main theoretical framework, we attempted to demonstrate how the researcher stablished a relationship between his own words and the others in the text versions that became two undergraduate research reports, a master dissertation and a PhD thesis. Thus, we intended to demonstrate the turning points by which the researcher passed though in different moments of his training in order to construct a proper place to express himself (RIOLFI; ALAMINOS, 2007). Our thesis is that though the analysis of the visible and the invisible signs of textual formulation (GRÉSILLON, 2007) it is possible to undertake constructions in analysis (FREUD, 1937) that allow us to calculate, cognitively, how the researcher is overcoming the epistemological obstacles that impede his knowledge reconstruction of the scientific modality (BACHELARD, 1996) and, subjectively, how, through the operations of alienation and separation (LACAN, 1964), the researcher put himself, emotionally, in order to be able to construct new knowledge. With regard to the specific objectives, we had: 1) Analyze the marks of textual revision in text versions written by a training researcher; 2) Analyze, in text versions written by a training researcher, the dynamic of overcoming the epistemological obstacles in moments that can be considered turning points (RIOLFI; ALAMINOS, 2007); and 3) Study the influence the interventions made by others (the supervisor and research group colleagues) in text versions had in the writing process of academic texts. The analysis of text versions allowed us to conclude that the surpassing of the epistemological obstacles is related to the possibility of the training researcher changing the relation he stablishes with knowledge. In order to do so, he needs to submit his initial impressions to a symbolic net, reformulating what had written.