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March–May 2005

Journal

This edition of the Teaching Fellows Journal has been restored from an archived online edition, hence the simplified form.

Edinburgh Napier University is a registered Scottish charity. Reg. No. SC018373

ISSN 2050-9995 (Online)

Please note - Some links and content within this document may now be out of date.

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EditorialJohn Cowan, Visiting Professor at Napier University and Emeritus Professor of Learning Development at the Open University, contributes this quarter’s editorial

Rambling thoughts of an idle fellow

In a pleasant position in the Zoological Society garden in Edinburgh Zoo, there used to be a wooden seat that bore a brass plate, on which was inscribed ‘This bench was presented by a Glasgow Fellow’. As an emigré from that oft-maligned city, I thought wickedly that it would be lovely to be able to amend the inscription, and give the credit to ‘a wee Glasgow fellow’. In the few paragraphs I have here, then, I offer the idle thoughts of a far from undersized Glasgow fellow, significantly without the capital ‘F’ which Fellow readers of this newsletter have honourably earned.

At the end of November, I was privileged to attend the social evening for new and established Teaching Fellows in Napier. I renewed some old friendships and, I hope, began to form some new ones. I came away thinking happily about what I had been hearing, for, during the evening, two of the new Fellows had independently volunteered a very positive reaction to the experience of compiling their portfolios. They told me that it had been demanding but especially worthwhile. They had had to think about what they valued in their teaching; and then they had had to seek out and assemble evidence to justify what they were claiming in respect of their achievements. They had only ever done part of that thinking previously, they told me, and the deepening self-awareness that emerged for them in consequence was, they felt, a valuable step forward in their professional development.

These remarks took me back to the period, some two or three years ago, when many experienced teachers were applying for membership of the then Institute for Learning and Teaching, now subsumed within the Higher Education Academy. The application process called on them to summarise their rationale for the various aspects of their work as university teachers, to then spell out how they translated that rationale into practice, and so to comment on how well they judged themselves to match up to desirable standards. Many of them, like the two Napier Fellows with whom I had been talking, had found the reflective self-scrutiny to be an influential and developmental experience.

Contents2 Editorial

4 Eureka!

6 Reports

8 Review corner

11 Web spotlight

Edition Editors

Angela BenziesSenior Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Academic Practice

Coordinator of the Teaching Fellowship Scheme

Margaret Nairntfj Web Editor and Publications Officer

Educational Development, Bevan Villa,Craighouse Campus, Edinburgh

Current enquiries to:Office of the Vice Principal (Academic)Sighthill Campus, Sighthill Court,Edinburgh EH11 4BN

Email: tfj@napier.ac.uk

http://www.url.napier.ac.uk/tf

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and a summative one. And, as someone who was an undergraduate student only ten years ago, I know that I preferred institutions to put in place — and put to good purpose — arrangements for formative evaluation before they dwelt too much upon summative evaluation. If there’s something less than ideal about my learning as a student, I’d like them to know about it, and have an opportunity to rectify it, in time to benefit me! Similarly, as a teacher, if there’s something less than ideal about my teaching, I’d like to be told about it, and have the opportunity to do something about it for my present group of students, and certainly before any summative judgement goes into the public domain. On the other hand, just as QAA stresses the need to be as alert to identify and celebrate joys as worries — or so they say, but do their reports always bear witness to that? — so, too, as learner and as teacher, I want to pinpoint what is working effectively, to be sure the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater, and to encourage further development and consolidation of effective practice — again as soon as possible.

I worry a bit about the present quality of our formative evaluations in HE generally, though, even in good practice. I feel most of our practice across the sector could do with some of the objectivity, rigour and purposefulness which is emerging in our best summative evaluations.

Much of the formative evaluation I encounter at module level is still based upon questionnaires, opinions voiced at course team meetings by involved staff, and slight minutes of committee meetings which often record little more than minor complaints. I would question this approach and do, when I am asked to review.

I ask:

• Are the samples from which opinions are derived representative?

• Are the teachers custodians of their own standards for formative evaluation or is there any externality in that aspect of the QA process?

• Do the evaluations provide data about the nature of the learning experience — or are they restricted to the students’ reactions to, and opinions about, the learning experience (important though these may be)?

• Do the evaluations provide data about the immediate learning or is the check on learning only made later, when the factors that contribute to

In higher education nowadays we have become much more objective and effective in dealing with all sorts of evaluations — and not merely evaluations on an individual basis. We are better at collective self-evaluation and we are finding that exercise equally beneficial for what we do. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the best of the self-evaluations that are being assembled and tabled by institutions for QAA, and by schools and departments for QAA or for routine review. In the past four or five years, I have been more and more conscious that good practice in this respect is indeed rigorous and hence persuasive.

Good practice in self-evaluation has these features:

• It is truly objective — goals, data and judgements are set out in factual terms

• It begins from a statement of what the institution, school or individual teachers intend to achieve

• It then sets out the sources of data which will be used to inform judgement, and the ways in which that data will be (reliably) obtained

• Hence the data or evidence is ingathered accordingly, and tabled

• The writers then state their judgement, formed by setting performance (as described by the data) against intentions

• The only remaining task for an auditor (or reviewer or judge) is not to assess, as in the past, but simply to check over the making of the writers’ self-judgement

• The self-evaluation often leads the writers to see scope for enhancement before anyone else notices, and it can also suggest to them how to bring that about.

I am clear that those of our colleagues, nationally, who have not yet reached this level of rigour in course and module evaluations will be under considerable norm-referenced pressure to do so, shortly. How fortunate are the teams and schools in Napier that can look for a lead to their Fellows, who have already developed the science (not art!) of self-evaluation. They, and Napier, will undoubtedly profit from building upon that experience and expertise. I wandered homewards, with that happy thought in mind.

I woke up the following morning in a rather more questioning mood. My Calvinistic conscience sternly reminded me that I have always treated evaluation as a process that may have both a formative purpose

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learning have been confused with other factors, and confounded?

• Are formative evaluations sufficiently timeous? Do they occur in time to benefit the current cohort, if such benefit is needed and if ways of achieving it can be identified?

Institutions, schools and individuals who have mastered the practice of objective and rigorous self-

evaluations with summative purposes have benefited in the lessons that emerge during the process, and in presenting self-judgements which only require light auditing before acceptance. Is a next priority for us all, and especially for Napier Schools and Fellows, to find ways of developing our processes for formative evaluation to embody and build upon the same rigour that characterises our current good practice in summative self-evaluations? •

Eureka!After much favourable comment on his ‘top tips’ in the September—November 2004 edition of the tfj, Phil Race, Senior Academic Staff Development Officer, University of Leeds, has kindly written new and original tips for us on making students’ degrees achievable

Napier plans to use these tips for student induction next session

Twenty top tips for making your degree achievable!

Want to get your degree Don’t just hope to get it. Be determined to get it, and to do everything you need to do to make it happen. Think positive. Think ahead to how much better your life will be with your degree. More choices available in your career. A better-developed brain.

Make good use of the intended learning outcomes In each module these tell you a lot about what you need to become able to do to actually pass. These help you to sort out what to learn from what not to learn. These help you to find out about what is fair game as an exam question and what is not. These help you to work out what your assessors are looking for in assignments.

Don’t bury your head in the sand Getting your degree is a big job, but like any big job is done one little bit at a time. Keep doing little bits of the job all the time, rather than hiding from the enormity of the whole task. You get your degree for doing all the little bits en route.

Confront your work avoidance tactics It’s all too easy to put off the evil moment of starting a task. Meanwhile, you could have got the task well under way. Don’t waste time feeling miserable about

all the backlog of work you’ve got – just do one thing from the backlog and you’ll immediately feel better. Then do another thing, and you’ll feel ahead of the game.

Don’t mix up ‘important’ with ‘urgent’ The danger is that if you’re too busy doing things that seem urgent, you’ll miss out on things that are really important. Do one short important thing before you do the urgent thing you’ve got to do that day. That’s one less thing that will become urgent. Revising last week’s lecture for ten minutes is often more important than the first ten minutes you will spend writing up this week’s assignment.

Don’t confuse being busy with working effectively It’s all too easy to be busy working at something which will only contribute a mark or two towards your degree, when you could have spent the same time on something that would count for a lot more. Being busy can actually become an advanced work avoidance tactic. Keep your eye on the big picture of getting your degree, not the small detail.

Don’t spend too long on any one thing Don’t get so involved in writing a particular essay or report that you miss out on spending time getting your head round the important concepts and ideas from the last couple of weeks’ lectures. An extra two hours might just get you one more mark on that essay. Two hours spent consolidating the last two weeks’ stuff might earn you ten marks in an exam.

Take charge of your workload Don’t just respond to the pressures around you. Be your own manager. Do what’s expected of you, and what’s required of you, but also do things that no-one has told you to do – for example going back over things you’ve already learned, making sure they’re not just slipping away again.

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Think questions Any important fact or concept is just the answer to a question or two. If you know all the questions, you’re well on your way to being able to answer any question that will come your way. Write down your own questions all the time – in lectures, when you’re reading, when you’re thinking, when you wake up, anytime.

Find out the answers to important questions Look them up. Ask fellow students. Ask lecturers when necessary. Don’t just guess the answers – check whether your guess is good enough. Life is too short to learn ‘wrong’ stuff.

Learning happens by doing Don’t just read things or listen to lectures or browse websites or books, handouts and articles. Do things all the time. Make your own headline notes. Practise solving problems. Practise answering questions. Do it again – repetition deepens learning. Find out what you need to do six times – this will be more important than something you only have to do once.

Find out how you’re doing – all the time Get as much feedback as you can – from lecturers, from fellow-students, and by comparing your own work with what’s in books, articles, websites, everything. Don’t just wait for feedback to come to you – go looking for it. Don’t be defensive when the feedback is critical – learn from it. Don’t be glib when the feedback is complimentary, build on it consciously.

Use your friends Show your draft assignments to anyone who will read them – fellow students, friends, family members – anyone who can read. Even people who don’t know anything about your subject can give you at least some useful feedback – perhaps on spelling or punctuation.

Self-assess all the time Don’t just wait for someone to assess your work. Apply the assessment criteria to your own work before you hand it in for tutor assessment. Cross reference your work to the intended learning outcomes, and work out which of these you’ve achieved, and which you have not yet achieved. The more you know about the standard of your own work, the better you’ll fare when others judge your work.

Practice makes perfect Exams measure how good you are at answering exam

questions under exam conditions. Practise answering questions as your main revision strategy. The more often you’ve jotted down the answer to a tricky question, the faster you can do it right one more time in the exam itself. Don’t just hope it will be all right on the day in the exam – make it all right by practising all the way up to the day itself.

Have a life Getting your degree isn’t all hard slog. You need time out for your brain to be refreshed. But build this time out into your overall strategy, rather than feeling guilty about it. There’s no better way to enjoy some time out than to take it at the point of just having achieved a useful chunk of learning. So earn your time out, then enjoy it.

Be cue conscious All the time, your lecturers are giving you cues about what’s really important and what’s less important. The intended learning outcomes give you cues too. You’ll get lots of cues from past exam questions. You’ll get even more cues by talking to fellow students and finding out what they think is important. But don’t let all these cues evaporate away – jot them down – preferably in the form of questions you need to become able to answer, or things you need to become able to do. When you know where you’re heading, you’re much more likely to be able to get there.

Take setbacks in your stride A low mark for an assignment is a useful learning experience – find out what to avoid doing again so that you don’t lose the same sorts of marks next time. Don’t just grumble that you deserved better marks. Learn what you can from each setback, then let it go and don’t brood over it.

Take pride in your achievements Don’t just worry about all the things you haven’t yet done – learn from things you’ve done well and build on that learning. There’s no way you can ever feel that you’re doing everything possible towards getting your degree – be reasonable with yourself.

Keep becoming better at studying At the end of the day, your degree is a measure of how well you’ve developed your study techniques and understanding – not just how much information you’ve crammed into your brain. Become ever more conscious about how you learn best. Explore all the possibilities – find out the techniques that really work for you, and develop them. •

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ReportsNapier staff conference report by Jenny Westwood, Academic Development Adviser, Educational Development

Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) report by Jan McArthur, Lecturer in Higher Education, Educational Development

Personal view on Napier’s staff conference ‘Student Employability: what part can you play in developing effective and confident students?’ report by Jenny Westwood

Nineteen Teaching Fellows formed part of nearly 80 delegates attending EdDev’s latest conference on 2 February 2005 – and its first to be accommodated in Craiglockhart’s new and impressive premises.

The conference was designed to help staff understand that the principles, concepts and ‘skilful practices’ that are encapsulated by the term Employability are not narrow and low level but are, rather, those that are central to, and congruent with, all we believe about good quality learning (Knight and Yorke, 2003). It’s probably worth emphasising, too, that a key point reinforced by all contributors throughout the conference was that Employability was very definitely not the same as employment – it needed to be bigger and more sustainable than that1. In his keynote speech, for example, Professor Peter Knight (Director, Institute of Educational Technology, Open University) was able to draw on recent (2003) research that had been carried out in the European Research Area, where it proposed that researchers, too, need a set of core competencies. To the reassurance of the developers of Napier’s own Employability Skills and Attributes model (2000) nearly all of these were encompassed in it!

The conference began with an introduction by Napier’s principal, Professor Joan Stringer, in which she skilfully linked the development of Employability with both the university’s priorities and the expectations of the HE sector as a whole. Anne Sibbald, Director of QES and institutional contact for Employability with the Quality Assurance Agency, then clearly and eloquently outlined the Scottish agenda, along with the activities and future plans of the national Employability Steering Group. One of her key points was that we at Napier University are not starting from the beginning. She was able to show a range of activities from across the university that are examples of good practice in this area. She emphasised, though,

our need to harness our activities and to ‘address the challenge of integrating employability with the totality of the student experience’. Peter Knight then engaged us with a stimulating and thought-provoking keynote. He began by reassuring us that UK thinking is consistent with that of other countries and likely to be adopted by the European Commission. He clearly equated the development of employability with the complex outcomes of HE learning and certainly threw us a few challenges. Key ones that I took away were:

• How do we help our students to see their progress in these complex areas in terms of the programme, rather than a series of atomised modules?

• How can we ensure that we don’t rely too much on development within co-curricular activities, as these lead to potential inequities for students?

• How do we help staff and students understand that the design and delivery of the curriculum itself is the place to ‘foster and stimulate employability’, particularly by engaging students with the curriculum processes rather than merely curriculum content?

• How can we raise the amount and quality of academic discourse of what’s involved – staff to staff, staff to employers, staff to students, students to students, students to employers and so on?

Following a much needed break, with an opportunity to both network and browse through a range of relevant resources, we returned to hear from three more presenters. The essence of their contributions was their practicality. Katy Malcolm, a recent successful NUBS graduate, exemplified what we wanted from our graduates – a person who could stand up confidently in front of an audience and put her contribution across in a clear and professional manner. She was able to show that, for her, there were three key elements in her programme that helped her to consciously develop a range of higher abilities: her dissertation, her work placement and her live project. She emphasised strongly, though, the key component, for her, in genuine development is the ability to self-assess – something that ‘is possible in any academic setting’. I felt that to be a key challenge to us, however nicely articulated!

Next on stage was Jennifer Graham, Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Marketing and Tourism. In

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her lively input, Jennifer outlined a module that she leads that was designed precisely to do the job that Peter Knight had been requesting of us. The module – Personal and Professional Development Planning – is a level 2 elective, though it is being included as an option in a couple of new programmes. It introduces students to, and gets them to use, a range of tools and techniques that help them to consider their own strengths and areas for improvement and to plan for improvements. The student voices presented at the end left no-one in the audience with any doubt as to the profound learning experience some students had gained from the module!

And finally, in his own inimitable style, Professor John Cowan, visiting Professor to EdDev, introduced us to ten tried and personally tested ideas of how he’s built suitable activities into his curriculum ‘without major programme changes’ – and again was able to show their benefit for the student. Two that particularly engaged me were:

• When presented with ‘a comprehensible but unfamiliar paper’ get students to spend time working out questions they would ask the author(s) if they had the chance. Award low marks for facile questions or not spotting relevant ones. Reward good questions, thereby helping to develop a ‘question-spotting and -asking culture’.

• Get students to write to and discourse with ‘your alter ego’, thereby developing an ability to present arguments with clear reasoning. As usual he helped us look at what we deliver with fresh and enthusiastic eyes!

John’s presentation and all the other presentations are available from the conference website.

The rest of the day was very usefully spent in task groups considering questions that allowed staff to contribute to the current and future Employability agenda within Napier. As ever, when collected in plenary, delegates made really useful points, but the star of the afternoon was Dr Judy Goldfinch, Senior Teaching Fellow in NUBS and member of the QAA Employability Steering Group, who collated all the points. She provided a skilful example of using the lecture theatre’s Activepanel to immediate effect – suddenly there were our collated contributions in black and white on the screen in front of us.

Many staff I spoke to went away from the conference with a clear view that, despite their former misgivings, they did, in fact, ‘do’ Employability – and all had ideas of how they could now ‘do’ it even better. Existing

believers seemed to go away with a spring in their step and a belief that they were no longer involved in subversive, low grade activities. The challenge for us all is to keep the academic discourse going and to see it translated into activities that lead to the enhancement of the student experience, with correspondingly more successful and confident students. I was very conscious that unless we build on our head start, we are likely to begin to fall further behind. It is vital that we build on the enthusiasm and discourse generated by this stimulating and challenging day.

ReferenceP Knight and M Yorke (2004) Assessment, Learning and Employability Maidenhead, Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press

1The definition of Employability that is commonly being adopted across the HE sector is ‘a set of achievements, understandings and personal attributes that make individuals more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations’ (Knight and Yorke, 2003)

Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) report by Jan McArthur

The 2004 conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) was held last December at the University of Melbourne, Australia. It was a massive event, with 1200 delegates and 1000 individual sessions over five days. The conference theme was ‘Doing the Public Good: Positioning Educational Research’. Delegates to the conference came from all three education sectors, and one quarter came from institutions outside Australia.

Keynotes from Professor Sally Power (Cardiff University) and Professor Anthony Petrosky (University of Pittsburgh) were given simultaneously in two lecture theatres and, using WebEx, shared with colleagues around the world in real time allowing for questions and discussion from around the globe. Sally Power’s keynote, ‘Markets and misogyny: educational research on educational choice’, gave a fascinating perspective on attitudes to both public and private education (public in Australia meaning state-funded) and choices made between the two. In particular she argued that we are witnessing the increasing vilification of high profile women for the choices they make about their children’s education.

Themes of the conference focused around the public/private dichotomy in education and the implications

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of this for educational research. How does the marketisation of education affect our ability to research it? Is such research a public good? Are the benefits private, while the agenda is public? These themes were underpinned by recent reports indicating that Australian education research has high impact and value, however, education researchers are increasingly asked to also produce a private benefit for their public institutions through contract research. Where are education research and researchers now positioned in the public/private debate?

I attended papers in three general areas – research methods, educational change and innovation and comparative and international education. Several colleagues researching within the secondary sector had a particular interest in inclusive, democratic, collegial or participatory forms of research into teaching practice. There were several ideas here that may be useful to consider within Napier’s Educational Research Network. Several colleagues reported on higher education in India and China and there was much to consider about the ethical and educational implications of western universities operating in these sectors.

The conference also provided an insight into issues within higher education policy in Australia, which in

time may well prove to be of direct relevance to us here in the UK. In particular, I was initially puzzled by the widespread hostility that was evident in several sessions I attended to student evaluation of teaching. I then learned that the Minister for Education had initiated a plan to use such evaluations to rank teachers and to publish individual teacher’s ranking on a website. An idea for the UK?

I presented a paper from research undertaken with colleagues Shirley Earl, EdDev, and Vivien Edwards, formerly of Napier’s School of Life Sciences, now at Edinburgh University, on the impact of our Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education on approaches to teaching, learning and assessment. This is still a work in progress, proposing some initial findings that suggest interesting further areas for enquiry. In particular, that the impact of the PgC TLHE is possibly evident less in individuals’ approaches to teaching, learning and assessment than in the general culture in which they practice.

Anyone wanting further information on this conference – please contact me (j.mcarthur@napier.ac.uk)!

All conference papers are available at http://www.aare.edu.au/04pap/abs04.htm. •

Review cornerTwo book reviews for this quarter’s tfj from Lesley Gourlay and Morag Gray

Lesley Gourlay, Lecturer and Teaching Fellow, School of Marketing and Tourism, reviews Teaching and Learning a Second Language: a guide to recent research and its applications by Ernesto Macaro (2003)

London: Continuum ISBN 0826467210

The oblique – and at times problematic – relationship between the Applied Linguistics research community and classroom practitioners has been a subject of concern for many years. The seeming lack of engagement with research on the part of practitioners has prompted various attempts to disseminate findings more effectively, and to relate them to teaching and learning practices. Macaro’s book has at its centre this mission – the aspiration to synthesise and interpret recent research in second language teaching and learning for the time-poor practitioner. Macaro

rejects the term application and instead favours transformation of evidence in order to effect learning. He aims to be international in the scope of the book, and to include research from disciplines which feed into the knowledge base about second language teaching and learning.

In his introduction he provides a set of guidelines for the interpretation of research, aimed at fostering a critical stance in the reader, by encouraging them to evaluate various aspects of the studies summarised throughout. He sets out his stall in the first chapter, which is entitled ‘What do second language teachers want from research?’. He summarises his own small-scale study investigating the needs and perceptions of secondary school teachers in England, reporting a preoccupation with themes such as vocabulary learning, learner motivation and gender differences in language learning. Chapter 2 then gives a retrospective overview of various strands of research, in an attempt to establish the extent to which studies in recent years have answered the requirements and expectations of these teachers. He claims that their

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needs may be met, but that the relevant findings are at times muddied by over-complex terminology and crucially what he calls in his outline ‘cultural gaps between professional communities’.

He divides this wide-ranging field into various themed chapters. Chapter 3 looks at second language acquisition research and summarises the influential theories of second language learning of the last 40 years, beginning with behaviourist conceptions of language learning, though Chomsky and subsequent Nativist views of acquisition, up to present-day debates about the role of memory and general cognitive faculties. In this chapter Macaro provides a concise and useful summary of these complex theoretical issues, alongside a digest of the more influential related studies. He goes on to look at variables hypothesised to affect language learning. Chapter 4 focuses on cognition, in particular vocabulary, looking at areas such as lexical storage, processing and retrieval. Chapter 5 investigates social factors and barriers to language learning, covering diverse yet inter-related topics such as motivation, peer pressure, gender, socio-economic factors and learner strategies. He goes on to devote the following four chapters to the skills required for linguistic proficiency – reading, listening, speaking and writing, with a focus on process, learner strategies and learner autonomy throughout.

For most readers, this is likely to be a book for dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover. The chapters and overall structure of the book are logical and cohesive, but it may have been even more practitioner-friendly in an ‘encyclopaedia of research’ format, with teaching implications given for each topic. However, as the author acknowledges, these fields are not easy to separate into discrete sub-areas, and the relationship between research findings and practice is far from linear. The generation of classroom implications can be problematic, and Macaro in his commentary does well to negotiate a line between the two common schools of thought among policy-makers and practitioners: on the one hand over-generalisation and prescription on the basis of slight or context-specific evidence, and on the other hand knee-jerk scepticism about the possibility of translating research findings to the classroom at all.

One slight problem is that at times Macaro seems unsure of the identity of his intended audience (perhaps having been set too wide a remit by the series editor?) He begins in an informal, almost jocular style, presumably aimed at reassuring teachers (and the advisers, parents and governors mentioned as

potential readers) that this is not a stuffy academic tome, for example, ‘Anyway, back to the reviews’. He even, slightly alarmingly, provides a gloss for theory. However a few pages on he employs terms like morphology and interactionist without definitions, and the tone becomes more one of an academic literature review. Additionally, if his primary goal is to enable to the practitioner to access and potentially ‘transform’ research, it may have been more engaging to break up the content with more frequent ‘implications for teaching’ or discussion sections in certain chapters which are rather long and densely-packed for a lay readership.

Overall, however, this book is an impressive achievement: an incredibly thorough and clearly written introduction to this field of enquiry, offering much to the highly-motivated classroom practitioner as well providing a clear starting-point to the Applied Linguistics Masters/first year PhD student. It is also of value to any practising researcher looking to revise, update and expand their knowledge of their own field, and perhaps more usefully, its neighbours over the fence. Macaro is particularly strong on the explication of the myriad overlapping theories jostling for position in this essentially multi-disciplinary area. He concludes by calling for more research to be done away from the overwhelmingly dominant setting of English as a Foreign Language at HE level, with a reorientation towards modern languages in the primary/secondary sector. He also appeals for greater cohesion of research goals and consensus of terminology, in particular the need for rigour when dealing with slippery concepts such as the advanced or successful learner. He also makes the excellent point that solely quantitative research can alienate the non-specialist reader, while triangulation using qualitative methods can open it up.

One point, however, seems to be missing in these debates about the relationship between theory and practice. The general assumption remains that research findings, if they are to inform teaching and learning, must first be filtered through the medium of (reluctant?) teachers. It would be interesting to see an attempt at ‘learner-friendly’ dissemination of research findings, focused on topics of concern to learners, such as study strategies. This could be integrated into their language input materials, and could possibly also serve to make explicit the rationale for dominant methodologies/ideologies of practice which are seldom explicated to the learners – ironically – as they are the ones with most invested in their success.

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Morag Gray, Senior Teaching Fellow and Head of Curriculum Development, Health and Life Sciences, reviews Theory of Education by David Turner (2004)

London: Continuum ISBN 0826472575

Turner begins by stating that the purpose of his book is to examine the criticisms that have been made of the quality of educational research. His aim is to offer suggestions as to how to improve educational research. He believes that the methods and procedures currently in use are inappropriate and therefore incapable of producing research of high quality. Turner argues that what is imperative is a reconsideration of the fundamental principles of what constitutes good educational theory. Essentially the remainder of his book focuses on this.

Turner presents the criticisms made by others, particularly those voiced by Toohey (1998) who refers to the questionable practice of the ‘adulation of great thinkers’. The criticisms are focused on researchers who either inappropriately or do not draw upon existing research because they don’t refer to primary sources, conduct replication studies or critique the underpinning educational theories. Turner reminds the reader that it is vital to match one’s research question with the appropriate research method. He stresses that poorly defined research questions and failing to place educational theory at the centre of the research process leads to particularly poor approaches to educational research. Another criticism levelled is the lack of involvement of policy makers and educational practitioners and ignoring the impact research can have on practice and policy.

In the first two chapters Turner strives to convey what he sees as the minimum criteria for what he considers ‘a good theory’. In his opinion a good educational theory should:

• be ethical in allowing scope for individual free will

• be multi-centred

• allow for partial autonomy between levels of understanding among the individuals, school and society.

In subsequent chapters there is an interesting investigation of a variety of educational theories including Piaget’s work that led to the almost universally accepted insight that to teach anybody we need to understand what individuals need from the learning process. Turner investigates game theory models to explore how they are used to describe educational behaviour and predict future-orientated behaviour. He also addresses linear programming as a means of incorporating complex data. At the beginning of chapter 8 Turner advises the reader that this chapter can be ignored by those who wish to skip over the mathematics involved in the previous chapters!

Turner finishes with chapters on multi-person game theory, system theory and chaos theory (or complexity theory). The latter, he argues, is becoming vogue in management and social sciences. He finishes off his book by sharing his vision for educational research based on a model derived from Chaos Theory which recognises:

• what happens at different levels are connected but not mutually determined

• organisations are not merely the sum of individuals who make them up

• an emphasis that there are iterative feedback loops with teachers influencing students, students influencing students and students influencing teachers but none of them absolutely determining the responses of the others.

He concludes his book by stating that ‘learning cannot be promoted by treating it as mechanically determined’ which I am sure those reading this review would agree. If you are looking for an in-depth text on educational theories, particularly games theory and chaos theory, then this will prove a useful resource. •

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Web spotlightThe web spotlight falls on the EducationUK website, produced by the British Council, the UK organisation which builds mutually beneficial educational and cultural relations between people in the UK and other countries

The EducationUK website offers international students who would like to study in the UK a database of available courses at all levels. The site offers several country-specific sites allowing access

locally. Information is also available on living in the UK (accommodation, food, health care and so on), scholarships and study advice, online and distance learning, research and studying for a PhD. Prospective students can request prospectuses, use the quick search facility and read topical news items.

Bookmark this attractive and informative website and share it with your international students and home students alike! •