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Record W2344310049

Research Use and the Impact in Secondary Schools

2011· dissertation· en· W2344310049 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Katherine Witherow

Bibliographic record

VenueTSpace (University of Toronto) · 2011
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicEducational Assessment and Improvement
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMathematics educationEnvironmental planningPolitical sciencePsychologyGeography
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The purpose of this research was to learn more about the ways that school and system leaders, access, engage with, share, and use research in their work. This research began with a framework developed by Levin (2004) and similar framing by Nutley et al (2007) suggesting that knowledge and use of research in schools depends on characteristics of the research itself (such as accessibility and perceived quality), characteristics of the educators and context (research background, interest level, supporting processes and structures) and the role of third party facilitators (such as professional media, experts, professional development providers) as distributors of knowledge.
\nThis study is meant to add to our understanding of the way research is taken up in secondary schools and districts by replicating and extending the recent work by Levin et al (2009) in a research study conducted with the Canadian Education Association (CEA) and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) entitled, “Research Use and its Impact in Secondary Education”. 
\n\tIn general, educators, like other professionals, have relatively limited direct knowledge of current research and rely on versions of research findings that they encounter in their daily work or from colleagues (Levin et al, 2009). This study examined the processes and practices in place within secondary schools and across a district school board to determine the facilitators and barriers to research use. The study addressed the following research questions:
\n1.\tHow do secondary school leaders access and use relevant research findings?
\n2.\tWhat are the main perceived barriers to the use of research by secondary school leaders? 
\n3.\tIn what ways does the school district support or hinder the use of research?
\nThese questions were designed to focus on the dynamics at the district level and the organizational capacity for knowledge mobilization. Data were collected through an online anonymous survey and semi-structured interviews. The online survey suggests that educators have a high regard for research in their professional practice, and that there is an array of opportunities for teachers and school administrators to engage with research. And, according to the respondents, the greatest challenge is finding the time to access the research. The findings also reveal that the although there is a high regard for research, research is generally not a priority in secondary schools and practice is based more on knowledge gained from colleagues or personal experience than from evidence-based research.
\nThe thesis concluded that there are many factors that both enable and hinder engagement with research and research use. Findings include the importance of culture and context of the school, the relationship between leaders’ actions and expectations and practice, relevancy of research to practice, the role of facilitation, the use of technology, and starting small to build a critical mass of teachers engaging with and using research in their practice.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.742
Threshold uncertainty score0.979

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0220.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.149
GPT teacher head0.444
Teacher spread0.295 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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