Information Sheet
Who can complete this survey?
Thank you in advance for completing this online survey!
We are seeking responses from all academics who undertake educational research, including: (a) anyone whose work was included in their university’s ERA 2010 or 2012 submission under FOR13 (the field of research code for education); and (b) researchers based in Education Faculties, Schools and Departments, whether or not they are publishing in Education.
How long will it take?
The survey will take approximately 30 minutes. To save time, you may like to have a copy of your publications record/ CV handy. Since it is not possible to save the survey mid-way through, we do ask you to allow 30 minutes for completion. When you have finished, the survey will automatically be saved and sent to a secure location.
Why should I do the survey?
We understand that academics have little time and are often surveyed. However, we hope that you will complete this survey because it will tell us more about who is researching education across Australia. This information will be used to inform discussions about strategic capacity building for Australian education research.
ERA2010 made it clear that FOR13 embraces a complex range of research and researchers. More researchers were submitted under FoR 13 than are identified with Faculties and Schools of Education. There are also researchers in Education academic units who submitted publications to discipline codes beyond FOR 13, but we do not know how extensive this disciplinary publication is, nor how it is directed.
Without knowing more about who is contributing to educational research, and about their developmental needs, we are ill-equipped as a country to invest intelligently in capacity building.
This survey addresses these issues by mapping the characteristics, distribution and research practices of these Education-related researchers in Australia.
Project info
The survey is part of a national initiative sponsored by the Australian Association for Research in Education and the Australian Council of Deans of Education. The overall goal of this joint initiative is to find ways of strengthening Australia's capacity to conduct and make use of high quality educational research.
The results will inform discussions about capacity building for Australian education research that will have implications for the work of Education-related researchers and their research students in Australia.
While the joint initiative has received funding from AARE and ACDE, the group who designed and administered the survey are volunteers contributing to the project.
Ethics statement
This project has Monash University Ethics Approval CF12/0564 – 2012000217. You can find the explanatory statement here. Survey responses are completely confidential and anonymous. This means that they cannot be traced back to you in any documentation emerging from this research.
Acknowledgements
The project team would like to acknowledge the following research projects and thank their authors for allowing us to draw on pertinent questions for this survey.
Lawn, M., & Furlong, J. (2007). The social organisation of education research in England. European Educational Research Journal, 6(1), 55-70.
Bexley, E., James, R., & Arkoudis, S. (2011). The Australian academic profession in transition: Addressing the challenge of reconceptualising academic work and regenerating the academic workforce. Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education. Used with permission of the authors.