Ethics

Getting involved in online communities can be a powerful way of helping you to enhance your practice by sharing your evaluations of approaches or resources that you have trialled with your class. Below are some links to online communities:

Education Endowment Foundation: Research Learning Communities

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/research-learning-communities/

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Getting teachers involved in research within their own schools provides exciting opportunities for enhancing practice in education. Creating online communities can facilitate the sharing of findings from these small-scale research projects. The next step is to develop a research approach that has the potential to draw together findings from small-scale studies to enable these to be made generalisable across a range of different educational contexts.

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In practice, exercising the right to withdraw from a research study may be difficult for certain groups of participants. In particular children may be reluctant to tell the researcher that they do not want to be involved in the project any more, particularly if that person is their teacher due to the power dynamics involved (Alderson, 2004). A related issue may be that the participant may just not want to answer a particular question, but feel obliged to do so.

An issue that arises often for researchers is how much information to provide to participants to enable informed consent to be achieved. The tension arises due to the potential for the information given to participants about the project may result in them saying things or behaving in ways that they would not have done if they had not known this information.

A significant challenge that a researcher faces in the process of gaining informed consent is negotiating access to participants within a particular context where a professional gatekeeper is legally in charge of ensuring the well-being of the individuals they are responsible for within that context e.g. an educational setting. In order to achieve this it is essential that you present an overview of your research clearly and professionally to the professional gatekeeper, demonstrating how you have taken into account all the possible ethical issues that may arise.

The process of thinking through the ethics underpinning your research at the planning stage is very important. However this is only the first stage in the process and actually ensuring that these ethical standards are implemented in your project is what matters in the end, and is what is the most difficult to achieve. Some of the challenges to ensuring that highest possible standards of ethics are explored in this section.