New educational research programme takes shape

“We have come far in educational research in Norway,” says Arvid Hallén, Director General of the Research Council. But much remains to be done. “There is enormous pressure from politicians to find answers to all the questions about what really works in the schools. Both relevant theory and effective methods are needed to provide these answers,” he continues.

Knowledge across disciplines

Kirsti Klette. (Photo: Sidsel Flock Backmann) There must be a greater degree of multidisciplinarity in Norwegian educational research. “It is not a good sign if all the researchers are using the same theories and methodologies. Now we need to promote greater breadth in the field,” says Kirsti Klette, chair of the UTDANNING2020 programme board.

“In our work programme we have defined educational research as a broad, multidisciplinary research field which economists, educators, sociologists, political scientists and subject didacticians are joining together to develop and investigate,” explains Ms Klette.

“This is a research field traditionally infused with ideology but with little instrumentalisation and few common quality indicators. We need contributions from others, such as economists, who have expertise in areas where social scientists lack insight,” she states.

Insight from international experts

Dominique Foray (Photo: Siw Ellen Jakobsen) The conference organisers invited participants of international stature in several subject areas.

Dominique Foray, a professor of economics at École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne in Switzerland, discussed the structural factors that impede innovation in the education sector. “Innovation requires that we develop and codify a common language as well as develop a culture for applying research in practice,” she said.

Richard Shavelson (Photo: Siw Ellen Jakobsen) Professor Richard Shavelson of Sanford University in the USA gave a presentation focusing on the need to identify general criteria for quality in research across methodological approaches. He warned, however, against “clearinghouses”, institutions that are concerned with finding a “gold standard” for what works.

Shared culture and tools needed

Ms Klette agrees that there is a need to develop common tools and quality indicators for educational research. She believes that one of the most important tasks facing the new programme board will be to get representatives from the various disciplines and academic traditions to work together to develop educational research as a dynamic scientific field.

Use register data!

Kjell Salvanes, a professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, encourages researchers to use the various data registers already available in Norway. He fears that educational research is losing out on unique opportunities when knowledge sources such as these are not sufficiently utilised.

“We know that teachers play a crucial role in the quality of schools, but we know too little about what makes a good teacher. We know that we have a high drop-out rate from upper secondary education and training, but we don’t know enough about what happens to those who drop out,” he says. Thanks to the existing data registers, Norway and the other Scandinavian countries have an exceptional opportunity to conduct in-depth research on precisely these issues. The greatest challenge is to convince educational researchers to buy into this concept, Mr Salvanes believes.

(Photo: Mari Solerød)

Kirsti Klette takes up the gauntlet. “Some of the renewal we hope to achieve under the UTDANNING2020 programme will come from combining the data sources and establishing creative feedback loops between qualitative and quantitative methods,” she asserts.

How to disseminate knowledge?

Ms Klette also notes that it is a major challenge to disseminate the knowledge we already have to the field of practice. Simply put, the question is: How do we convey this knowledge to the teachers?

“In this case, publication in scientific journals is not enough, and unfortunately other good tools for dealing with this problem do not currently exist in the education subjects,” says Ms Klette, who suggests that this would be a natural task for the new knowledge centre for education that the Research Council plans to launch in 2011.