Improving educational practitioner research

Forging better links between research and practice is key to improving the quality of education in schools and other settings (BA/RS, 2018; DfE, 2018). There is growing enthusiasm among education practitioners for their teaching to be
better informed by research. Practitioners who want to be more than critical consumers of educational research, or participants in studies led by academics, often wish to conduct research themselves in their own schools. This is a potentially powerful way to address practical challenges of importance in their own contexts (Coldwell, et al., 2017). The British Educational Research Association report Research and the Teaching Profession (Furlong et al., 2014, p. 27) "stressed that the development of a research-rich culture is vital if schools and colleges are to develop and sustain the capacity for self-improvement", and recommended a sustained "focus on enquiry-based practice ... throughout teachers' professional careers" (p. 6).
It is common for trainee teachers, or practitioners doing masters qualifications in education, to conduct their own small scale action research projects, and support is also available for this kind of inquiry/research through various institutes,
such as the Chartered College of Teaching and the Education Endowment Foundation. However, the quality and value of these research studies is not always high. Without appropriate support, such studies may not produce findings that
can be meaningfully interpreted, and may even embed misconceptions about educational research that can hinder, rather than support, practitioners' critical engagement with wider research (Bennett, 2013). The British Educational
Research Association report mentioned above (Furlong et al., 2014, p. 6) recommended that teachers "need to be equipped to engage in enquiry-oriented practice".
Using mathematics as a case study, this project will examine the nature of the research that practitioners conduct in their schools or other settings, whether...