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A design research programme in mathematics education by The University of Nottingham has been taken up by two powerful US change agents — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics — as a key element in their strategies to improve the quality of teaching and learning in secondary mathematics classrooms across the US.
Beginning with small-scale design research on diagnostic teaching in mathematics, effective principles for the design of lessons were developed to enable teachers to adapt to students' learning needs. These principles were then engineered into robust products and processes through systematic, closely observed classroom trials.
Professor Julian Stern was one of the lead organisers of, and contributors to, a series of eleven research-oriented seminars (between 2004 and 2010), bringing together teachers, advisors, and higher education professionals working on, and interested in, religious education research in UK schools and internationally. This impact case study identifies the influence of those seminars on the 161 participating professionals, on pupils, and on schools. Evidence is provided of the widespread and long-term impact of the research, particularly on the participants and on pupils, both directly through the seminars and through the various seminar-related publications.
Researchers from Oxford Brookes University have significantly contributed towards driving improvements to teaching and learning through an evidence-based approach. They have influenced practice and policies, whilst challenging public perceptions about the impact of education. Through their partnership with the University of Westminster, the Westminster Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training has improved teaching and learning in the Learning and Skills Sector, engaged with the design and delivery of enterprise education programmes for Further Education leaders and championed the status of vocational education. They have actively contributed to public debates and their research continues to be disseminated and used in training throughout the UK.
The mode and structure of initial teacher education (ITE) is an instrumental factor in the quality of pupil learning and educational attainment. University of Glasgow research had a direct role in re-shaping ITE by substantially influencing Teaching Scotland's Future: Report of a review of teacher education in Scotland, the government's most comprehensive and radical review of teacher education and professional learning for the last 20 years. The final government report specifically called for a `hub model' of teaching schools, similar to a model being piloted at Glasgow, to be introduced across Scotland, effecting a transformation in the way that Scotland's 49,000 teachers are initially taught and trained.
`Opening up education' is a sustained theme of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET). Across more than 25 projects, active from 2008, our research has been instrumental in establishing and shaping the global agenda in open education, especially through open licensing of content and tools. Our evidence-driven and action research has two strands of impact:
Our innovative collaborations and community engagement are international with examples of practice in Brazil, Africa and Europe, and strategic influences in USA, UK and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The research in this impact case study has affected discourses concerning professional development and pedagogy from early years classrooms to higher education. By challenging orthodoxies, researchers have delivered new and generative understandings of teacher knowledge that have influenced debate in educators' communities and professional associations. Consequently, these bodies have used our research to guide their approach to the advancement of policy, practice and professional development in all education sectors. The impacts of our research have reached out to a range of national contexts including the UK, Australia, Cyprus, and South Africa.
This case study is based on research into the Dissolving Boundaries (DB) Programme which uses ICT and face to face contact to address post-conflict mistrust between young people in Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI). With funding from the Departments of Education in Belfast and Dublin, the programme has been operating in 300 schools since 1999. Research led by Austin (2004, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2013) has had an impact in four broad ways; first, on teacher professional development by refining practice of collaborative learning using ICT; second, on the quality of pupil learning, including perceptions of cultural difference; third, on government policy in the way ICT is assessed by requiring schools to use "exchange" as a new requirement and, fourth, internationally, through supporting the `north-south' strand of the Belfast Agreement 1998, and shaping similar work in England and the Middle East.
The IOE researchers featured in this case study have had a major and sustained impact on education in the Indian sub-continent. Geeta Kingdon has shaped UK government policy on educational aid to India. She has also helped to ensure that millions of poor children in Uttar Pradesh — India's most populous state — qualify for free places in private schools. Angela Little's work in Sri Lanka has raised the profile of primary education, which has been hampered by low status and inadequate funding. She has also done much to improve the life chances of the country's disadvantaged children — particularly those growing up on tea plantations.
A corpus of research developed over twenty years brings together experience and expertise of staff, students and researchers at Birmingham City University in the Early Years (EY) cluster. This has had effects on practice in contexts in which national and international EY policy, leadership and pedagogy are developed and produced, enacted and contested. It has affected specific areas of learning and development, e.g. mathematics, including thinking skills, creativity, information and communications technology.
Research that was policy, programme and issue-focused has stimulated discussion and action, locally, nationally and internationally, for instance in Europe, Central and South-east Asia and Australia.
A unique insight in The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (2008), and developed through an ESRC Seminar Series, is that a therapeutic ethos in education is creating a diminished human subject through a `dual attack' on the human subject as a knowing subject and the subject-based curriculum.
A conscious public defence of the subject-based curriculum was then undertaken through seminars, debates and conferences involving think tanks, charities and union organisations. The appointment of Professor Dennis Hayes to the London Mayoral Education Inquiry (2012) was one consequence. The Inquiry resulted in funding of £24.5 million for the London Schools Excellence Fund.