User engagement

Research funders have become increasingly interested in commissioning research that develops meaningful user engagement throughout the process of framing research questions, research design, data collection, analysis, reporting and dissemination. The TLRP seminar series ‘Making a Difference: Working with users to develop educational research’ aimed to develop the capacity of educational research to meet this challenge and make a difference to policy and practice through better understanding and promotion of user involvement. The outcomes of this seminar series included papers on User Engagement in Research: Implications for Research Design by Anne Edwards, Judy Sebba and Mark Rickinson and Making A Difference: working with users to develop educational research by Anne Edwards. Examples of contributions by seminar participants included:

• Michael Preston-Shoot who drew upon examples of user engagement drawn from an article co-authored with Suzy Brae on Emerging from out of the shadows? Service user and carer involvement in systematic reviews
• Lesley Saunders who has produced Supporting Teachers' Engagement in and with Research and Educational research commissioned by/for policy audiences.

All TLRP projects had substantive user engagement as one of their organising principles, but in addition a number of projects produced outputs specifically related to issues of user engagement. For example, see:

• Bloomer and James (2001) from the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education project outlined their team’s commitments to forms of enquiry in which educational research and the professional development of teachers are integrated in a conference paper on Educational research in educational practice
• An updated version of the paper by Bloomer and James was subsequently published in the Journal of Further and Higher Education, which argued that research in practice, properly construed and accomplished, offers practitioners a means of developing understandings of their practices and it is such understandings which are central to processes of achievement, enhancement and change in educational practice: see Educational research in educational practice (2003)
• A paper by Cleary and colleagues (2005) on Doing collaborative research to enhance teaching and learning in community based further education, based on the experience of working collaboratively with staff in two FE colleges.
• A SERA conference paper by Smith and Anderson (2004) on Research journeys: an exploration of collaborative practitioner research in Further Education

Other relevant resources included:

• A summary of a recent study by RAND (2007) of the impact of an earlier ESRC programme: Policy and practice impacts of research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council A case study of the Future of Work programme. The full document is also available.
• TLRP's initial Communication and Impact Plan was produced by John Kanefsky as a BERA conference paper in 2001: Research Impact and the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme.

Publications related to this general theme are listed below: