This post is the final one in a series of outcomes from my MA in Education work. In the first post, I looked at why might schools use research? In the second post, I looked at what makes up a teaching and learning culture, and in Part 3, I looked at how people generally view education research in comparison to other factors that shape it. In my fourth post, I looked at how that attitude changes depending on the extrinsic situation you’re in! In post five, I looked at how the intrinsic attitudes to school culture shaped people’s use of educational research.

If you’ve read all of that – thanks so much for coming on this journey with me (PS: I can recommend a great therapist or sleep doctor for the situation you’re in, I think!)

So, for the final post, what can I conclude?

This study has presented an investigation into the factors which create teaching and learning cultures in schools, and the extent to which education research is important to this aim. While studies into the nature of teaching and learning cultures, and into the nature and implementation of educational research have been conducted separately, few studies offer a deliberate look at the interaction between the two in school contexts. With a sample size of 320, this study offers a non-trivial overview of a topic which is of importance in terms of professional development (Kraft & Papay, 2014), workload and wellbeing of staff (Worth & Van Den Brande, 2020) and is also one of the most powerful levers we can pull in terms of inequalities and student outcomes (Sutton Trust, 2011).

Three research questions were asked: and the key conclusions for each of them shall be presented in turn, together with overall recommendations from this work.  

Q1. How important is the use of educational research in the creation of teaching and learning cultures?

The use of educational research is of some significance in the creation of teaching and learning cultures. It is not as highly regarded as a motivation by itself at the macro-scale, but becomes more powerful within certain cultural and contextual groups. Schools who are on the borders of achieving external validation (through either exam results, or through inspection judgements) tend to rate it highly as a part of their staff development culture, and the staff in those schools are confident in its’ use, confident in the link to student outcomes, and describe their culture in positive terms. This supports Bernhard et al. (2020)’s interpretation that research is often used in direct motivation to improve specific student cultures and outcomes, and tends to assert that the staff in these schools respond to the extrinsic motivation positively. There are multiple schools who have a clearly defined teaching and learning culture, but perhaps do not rate research as highly as their own experience and context. This suggests that they have other, intrinsic motivations for the decisions they take to create their culture, and are confident in their approach to success.

A number of schools have mixed or negative cultures for teacher development and professional learning. Here, staff report that research can be under-utilised leading to frustration, or can be used in an ineffectual way that creates higher workload for staff. The specific details of structures, context and characteristics of culture are not easily transferable, and it seems that the contextual factors of understanding are critical to the implementation of teaching and learning cultures, and research informed practice alike.

Q2. How do intrinsic motivations support the use of educational research in the creation of teaching and learning cultures?

Intrinsic motivations were defined as those which were done in response to something within the school context. This may include the attitude of leadership, the features and structures of support created, and the aspirations, interests and preferences of staff and senior leaders. Participants were asked to describe their teaching and learning culture, and this data was codified and used as a method to explore the variance of intrinsic motivation across schools.

Positive school cultures were over three times more likely to have majority staff participation, two times more likely to use education research, and nearly eight times more likely to value their school’s leadership and use of education research as part of creating success

Tweet

The dichotomy between participant’s prior research training and confidence in research use needs further investigation, to evaluate whether some schools (or structures) have particularly effective methods of disseminating and embedding research informed practice in to their culture. There was little difference, in general, between the confidence in the use, and efficacy of education research attitudes amongst participants, and it is important to investigate and contextualise this in a sampling technique that perhaps better represents the breadth of teacher experience, as well as school contexts.

Most teachers who responded seemed to be positive about their use of research, and about the wider motivations behind education research, which forms an interesting conclusion about the nature of the profession and the recent changes.

Q3. How do extrinsic motivations support the use of educational research in the creation of teaching and learning cultures?

Irrespective of context, experience and existing external judgements, it seems that most respondents thought that their teaching and learning cultures were more extrinsically motivated than intrinsically. As Malin et al. (2020) have observed, the UK’s relatively high stakes accountability process for school leaders means that keeping the inspectors and the exam results positive appear to be embedded in to the vast majority of cultures reported. Even where this was not successful (i.e. in schools with poorer exam results, or with lower inspection judgements), the rating of this as a factor in the motivation of the school was high. Other potential extrinsic motivators (e.g. stakeholders, parents or Governors) barely had an impact on the responses: suggesting the focus is on those judgements which are externally accountable.

Educational research is perceived to be a powerful lever to pull in this circumstance, and although there is some support for the thesis of Bernhard et al. (2020) about the focus on student outcome, and the potential ‘shield’ that research offers, it seems that for many schools, there is a genuine belief in the utility and effectiveness of education research as a method of making a difference towards their external outcomes.

There is limited evidence to suggest that the best cultures are created when these external factors are clearly identified, and there is a mechanism by which the staff team unifies around a purpose. Structurally embedded features that disseminate, build confidence with, and clarify the use of educational research generally tend to lead to positive descriptions of culture, and there is a potential implication here for school leaders and decision makers.

In presenting this study of the relationship between the use of research, and the perceptions of culture, it has been shown conclusively that the context of an individual school (as a snapshot through time) is the most significant factor of all. Understanding these relationships at the synoptic scale is a useful starting point for further research, which I hope will be able to give far more direction to the way in which these trends can be interpreted and implemented for best outcomes for staff, and students, alike.

This post is the fifth in a series of outcomes from my MA in Education work. In the first post, I looked at why might schools use research? In the second post, I looked at what makes up a teaching and learning culture, and in Part 3, I looked at how people generally view education research in comparison to other factors that shape it. In my fourth post, I looked at how that attitude changes depending on the extrinsic situation you’re in!

In the final analysis blog post, I want to look at how this varies depending on your school’s culture, and explore how intrinsic motivators change the attitudes people have.

By comparison to the extrinsic motivators of Ofsted and exams results, the “culture” of the school was described as the key intrinsic motivator for why research was adopted and used in different settings. It is therefore the key proxy to be used in this section as part of the “intrinsic” motivations analysis; however, it is also inextricably linked to the external drivers as we have just shown in the previous discussion.

In this post, I will outline the relationships that we find, and explore some of internally driven reasons that might help to explain why schools use educational research to build their cultures.

Chart to show the relationship between description of culture, and the participation ratio

First, it’s important to demonstrate the relationship between participation and the school’s teaching & learning culture. This is shown here: with 84% of respondents in a ‘positive culture’ having majority (i.e. greater than 50%) participation from their staff team.

By contrast, negative school cultures only had 23% participation by the majority: and 72% of those schools had less than a quarter of staff involved. Clearly, setting an appropriate culture of professional learning in a school – which was identified as a relatively low factor in the original analysis – has fairly substantial effects within the school itself, endorsing Kraft & Papay (2014)’s analysis of teacher professional development.

Chart to show the relationship between the use of educational research and school culture

In terms of the research question focus on education research, this shows some sharp differences in the extent to which people use educational research in their context.

For the ‘negative’ cultures, it’s only 9% of responses in the two positive categories; with 39% disagreeing, and 42% strongly disagreeing. The ratios are not quite reversed in the ‘positive’ culture, but 17% of this category strongly agree, with a further 41% agreeing. Only 21% had a low use of educational research with strong/disagreement.

Chart to show the relationship between confidence in the use of educational research, and the school culture

A similar trend can be observed in the confidence rating by staff here. 48% of staff in positive school cultures have confidence in their school’s use of educational research, where only 6% of negative school cultures feel the same. 81% of staff in negative school cultures are not confident in their school’s use of research; this figure is only 22% in the positive cultures.

Investigating what drives that confidence, particularly in light of the previously discussed training and experience analysis, and understanding how to derive that dynamic would be a fascinating area for further investigation, and a deeply interesting case study to explore.

Chart to show the relationship between staff interests and the school culture

The wider intrinsic-motivation trend of change is shown again here. One of the potential drivers of the culture ‘fit’ is the extent to which staff feel their personal values and aspirations are aligned with the schools.

Here, we see that there is some evidence that ‘positive’ cultures are more aligned with their staff: 68% of staff think that it’s important to be aligned and cohered between staff interest in research and utility; while that’s only 34% in the negative schools. The mixed cultures sit approximately in between these two extremes, echoing the interesting potential trend that has started to emerge from the other cultural analysis.

Chart to show the relationship between the interests of SLT, and the culture

By contrast, the ‘mixed’ culture is dominated by the feeling that Senior Leaders’ interests are the driving force behind the use of educational research: perhaps reflecting why the culture is described in mixed terms! This shows that in ‘positive’ cultures, this is still fairly high, at 73%, and lowest in the ‘negative’ cultures at 67%. The importance of leadership, both in terms of setting a research agenda, and in terms of building the culture, is echoed in these responses.

Figure 36: Chart to show the relationship between education research and workload, sorted by school culture

The use of educational research to generate better workload for staff (Figure 36) appears to be an important motivator: the positive responses are significantly higher (68%) in the ‘positive cultures’, compared to 45% in the mixed and 42% in the negative culture. Nearly 45% of staff in a ‘negative’ culture feel that this is unimportant; and it seems likely that staff being asked to do more, may well begin to describe their culture in negative terms.

Figure 37: Chart to show the relationship between educational research and teacher development, sorted by school culture

However, perhaps surprisingly, the link connecting education research to other intrinsic factor of “teacher development” is less decisively connected to culture (Figure 37).

Here, for example, we can see that there isn’t much variance between the extent to which people believe in the use of research for personal development; and in fact it’s the ‘negative’ cultures which have the highest proportion of positive responses to this prompt (90%), rather than the 83% of the ‘positive’ cultures. It may well be, as described earlier, that these schools are directing their access to research more significantly, and teachers feel confident in this cultural steer.

Figure 38: Chart to show the relationship between educational research and the intent to improve results for students, sorted by school culture

The relatively tangled motivations and attitudes are demonstrated again by the link between intrinsic and extrinsic factors in Figure 38.

95% of ‘positive’ cultures describe student outcomes as fairly or very important reasons to use education research, a figure that is closely matched by the mixed (79%) and negative cultures (80%). The lack of any negative responses in the mixed culture is suggestive of external pressures as the key driver, but this is only speculative. Similarly, the mixed culture (figure not shown) shows most importance given to external inspectors (64%), closely followed by the negative cultures (62%). While there is slightly less importance given to the inspectorate (56%) by the positive cultures, its’ influence is undeniable even here.

This post is the fourth in a series of outcomes from my MA in Education work. In the first post, I looked at why might schools use research? In the second post, I looked at what makes up a teaching and learning culture, and in Part 3, I looked at how people generally view education research in comparison to other factors that shape it. In this post, I look at how that attitude changes depending on the extrinsic situation you’re in!

It’s a brief discussion – and I welcome all thoughts & ideas from it! It’s highly tentative, and comes with disclaimers and context as described.

Extrinsic Motivator: Examination Results

Having identified “better results” as the most important motivator in the use of educational results from my sample, further analysis is now conducted to explore the dimensions of that experience in creating T&L cultures. All respondents are split according to their self-described results, with the table showing the distribution of these groups. Any respondents who did not answer this question are removed from further analysis in this section.

Description of Results	Respondents	% of Respondents
Significantly better than local schools	72	24.9
A bit better than local schools	86	29.8
About the same as local schools	75	25.9
A bit worse than local schools	39	13.5
Significantly worse than local schools	17	5.9

Table 1: Distribution of responses by self-described categorisation of examination results

Responses are standardised by category, and presented as percentage of the responses in an individual category: while this potentially skews analysis to a greater percentage for the lower categories, it enables easier comparisons to be made between schools with different results.

With the collective response showing the importance of results, the original hypothesis was for the general trends to reflect grading differences; in other words, schools with better results would have better teaching and learning cultures and feel more positively about them, and perhaps by association, their use of educational research.

Figure 19: Chart to show the importance of examination results, sorted by category of exam results

As the primary motivator of collective responses using educational research, the categorical response to the same question is interesting. All responses in the “significantly worse” category, and all but 13% of the “a bit worse” group rate the use of educational research as very or fairly important in driving their school teaching & learning culture.  However, there is no significant disparity between the attitudes: almost all categories show consistently higher than 85% positive relationship with the use of research to generate results.

Figure 20: Chart to show the belief in educational research as a driver of exam results, sorted by category of exam results

However, when we look at the impact of that process – rather than the motivation – there is more of a shift. Figure 20 shows that schools who have better/significantly better results appear to have fewer positive associations with education research: perhaps they can identify other factors to which they can attribute their exams success, whereas schools who identify as “same” or “a bit worse” are dominated by the positive responses. It is interesting that the schools who describe themselves as “significantly worse” do not seem to have full confidence in the impact: 25% of respondents are neutral or disagree that educational research is effective.

Figure 21: Chart to show the importance of using educational research to satisfy inspectors, sorted by exam categories

If we look at the Bernhard et al. (2020) hypothesis which suggests schools use evidence as an anchor (or shield) against inspection judgements, it is interesting to note that there is no single response that says “not at all” in any category. Figure 21 shows the inspection process clearly has some weight, even if exam results are uppermost in responses, and judgements of importance. The highest proportion of responses “for Ofsted” appear to be done in the areas doing a little worse than local schools (75% positive), just ahead of those doing significantly better (68% positive). These two groups are notably above the other three categories; and indeed, the lowest ranked category of exams results appears to be least likely to use educational research to satisfy external inspectors.  A similar result is shown in the relationship between educational research and parental/Governor satisfaction, with the analysis not shown here for brevity. Schools where exam results are significantly worse appear to have limited interest in the utility of research to satisfy external stakeholders; with a majority neutral opinion, and no regard for it as very important. As school exam results improve, the trend is for the views of stakeholders to be more positively regarded in the use of educational research.

Figure 22: Chart to show the relationship between descriptions of teaching and learning culture, sorted by exam categories

It is important to consider whether the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for utilising educational research overlap. In this section, some of these intrinsic elements are unpicked further.

First, Figure 22 explores the relationship between the description of teaching & learning culture and the exam results. In general, it seems that the culture is described more positively where the exam results are better – potentially through either causal mechanisms of validating the efforts made by staff, or by creating a positive culture leading to good outcomes. There is no evidence to suggest either of these is more likely than the other!

The least positive relationship appears to be in places where the results are described as “a bit worse than local schools” which may well reflect changes and local challenges, or the imposition of a “turn around” culture and the potential tensions therein.

Figure 23: Chart to show attitudes towards educational research and teacher development, sorted by exam category

Figure 23  shows that the reflection of utility of research for personal development similarly shows an unexpected relationship. The highest confidence in personal development through the use of educational research comes in schools whose results are comparable to local counterparts (93% positive), and then there is a decline away from that down to 79% positive in those significantly better, and 77% positive in those significantly worse.

Figure 24: Chart to show attitudes towards educational research and workload, sorted by exam category

Similarly, when comparing an extrinsic factor to an intrinsic one, we see differences between schools, though this time at a different level. Figure 24 suggests that workload appears to be consistent between the top three categories of exam results, and there is little appreciable difference in the responses. However, the schools with worse exam results seem to split considerably, with a larger range of responses. For the “bit worse” category, the workload utility of research is the lowest of all sectors: only 54% positive rated, and the highest “not very important” at 23%. By contrast, the schools describing as “significantly worse” than local schools show the highest positivity for workload impacts: up to 74%, and the smallest neutral and not important ratings of all categories.

It seems that workload and processes are variable, and the pressures of schools in “turn around” status can often be significantly varied. It is beyond the scope and method of this enquiry to explore the experience of these examples; the originally intended method of triangulation interviews might have given further insight to the nature of work in these schools, but it offers a departure from this enquiry.

Figure 25: Chart to show the relationship between exam results and inspection results

Finally, Figure 25 shows the challenge of attempting to disentangle the motivations of extrinsic factors as identified in the limitations section.

There is a clear relationship demonstrated between exam results and inspection outcomes: 89% of the schools with significantly better results are graded as outstanding or good; while only 29% of the schools with significantly worse grades are graded so. Overwhelmingly, those schools are rated as RI (30%) or inadequate (41%). The challenge of correlation vs causality, and the inability of the quantitative data to unpick rationales is demonstrated quite clearly here: we can’t interrogate each enquiry to understand the motivations, and have a triangulation conversation to explore how and why each of these relationships are linked to their context.

This leaves the potential conclusion that the extrinsic motivation of examination results is important, and that schools in the edges of the median position seem to feel this pressure most significantly. They have the most positive attitudes towards the ability of education research, the impact on outcomes and seem to accept the workload consequences!

Extrinsic Motivations: Inspection Judgement

Accepting this co-variability and the potential limitations of the extrinsic factors overlapping, all respondents were split and analysed by their self-described inspection grades, to explore whether there were more obvious trends apparent.

Rating	Number	% of Schools
Outstanding (OFSTED)/Excellent (ISI)	81	28.8%
Good (OFSTED, ISI)	150	53.3%
Requires Improvement (OFSTED)/Sound (ISI)	35	12.5%
Inadequate (OFSTED)/Unsatisfactory (ISI)	15	5.3%
Prefer not to say	23

Table 2: Distribution of Responses by Inspection Category

For the purpose of simplicity, the OFSTED terminology will be used hereafter to describe both categories of school inspection.

The majority (53.3%) of schools self-described as “good”, with about a third as “outstanding” and the rest split between RI and Inadequate status. 23 respondents preferred not to disclose the information, and were discounted from further analysis as a result.

As before, these varying categories are scaled to show standardised comparisons, noting and accepting the potential distortion of oversampling the lower categories.

Figure 26: Chart to show the attitude towards results in creating teaching and learning culture, sorted by inspection category

Building on the previous relationship between results and inspection category, Figure 26 shows that inadequate and RI category schools rate the use of education research as almost entirely to drive better results. While there is minor difference in the positive ratio for good/outstanding schools, there is less criticality: more define it as “fairly important” rather than very important as a reason to engage with education research.

Further analysis (graph not shown) suggests that there is a relatively consistent belief in the efficacy of the utility of educational research, where 65-75% of respondents in all categories describe a positive belief that research drives results. Only a small fraction (less than 5%) believe that there are no impacts on student results. The consistency of purpose, rather than intrinsic belief in the implementation of educational research, tends to suggest that the extrinsic motivation for using it is more significant than the intrinsic judgement of whether it yields the right outcome.

Figure 27: Chart to show the confidence in the use of educational research, sorted by inspection category

This trend appears to be continued through the confidence in research analysis in Figure 27.

While not as stark, there does appear to be a small trend in the confidence in the use of research as employed by the school as an inverse relationship with inspection outcomes. While only 36% of outstanding schools are confident, nearly 54% of the inadequate schools describe their confidence in the school’s use of research positively.

Further evidence (not shown) shows a consistent perception across all categories in the efficacy of research in personal development; suggesting that the use, and the teachers’ role in the process is less important than some of the contextual elements (results, judgement status).

This may well link to the appointments and structural themes identified earlier, including the designation of Research or Evidence Leads, and might be reflected in further study and analysis.

Figure 28: Chart to show the extent of educational research utility, sorted by inspection category

This perhaps connects to the perceived utility of educational research (Figure 28), with inadequate schools again showing a much greater positive response (73%) compared to RI (57%) and outstanding (47%) or good (41%).

The response rate for negatives (disagree/strongly disagree) remains reasonably consistent across all four categories; what changes appears to primarily be the extent to which people have “neutral” opinions on this question: from 24% neutral in a good category, through to none in the inadequate.

This may be an interesting result to explore further; but could also be a limit of the comparatively small sample size of the inadequate category.

Figure 29: Chart to show the relationship between teaching and learning culture and the satisfaction of external inspectors, sorted by inspection category

The previous link between exam results and external stakeholders is reinforced through further analysis of Figure 29, and a similar pattern found. Again, not a single respondent believed that there was no impact of external inspectors on the use of research.

There is little difference between the outstanding/good schools in their rationale relative to external inspectors, and they are fairly close to the inadequate schools, too (55% important in the outstanding/good vs 40% important in the inadequate category).

However, the schools ‘on the margin’ of requires improvement appear to be most driven by the OFSTED rationale: with 77% of respondents believing that the extrinsic inspection rational was fairly or very important.  A similar trend to the exam results is shown in the satisfaction of parents and governors (data not shown here). All but the ‘inadequate’ category showed relatively consistent attitudes to the use of research to satisfy parents. Inadequate schools regard the use of research to satisfy parents as relatively unimportant: 42% as “not very important” and 50% as neutral.

In terms of extrinsic motivators, then, it seems that Ofsted and results are inextricably linked, and are the key external drivers of the use of educational research in schools.

Figure 30: Chart to show the extent to which participants believe in the impact of education research on workload, sorted by inspection category.

Of the potential variables, the most significantly demonstrated intrinsic motivation for schools is the efficacy of education research in the ability to improve workload for teachers.

Although some observable disparities exist (Figure 30), there is some consensus across the three top categories. Inadequate schools stand out again, as the exception to the wider trend: with a very divided response (no neutral opinions), and a 70:30 split in terms of in favour vs disagreement.

The interpretations of the data sorted by external judgement and exam results would appear to support the conclusion that educational research is used to satisfy extrinsic motivation, and agree with Bernhard et al. (2020)’s hypothesis of research being used as a “shield” for judgements by schools in the two lower categories. We see similar levels of confidence and understanding about the efficacy of research and how it translates in to impact, but a greater utilisation of educational research as a mechanism to build teaching and learning cultures in schools.

It would be interesting to explore the extent to which these schools also have a strong leadership team, or an appointed “Teaching and Learning Lead”, because the relatively high confidence in how educational research is being interpreted and applied to setting does not relate to the prior training and experiential questions. This might generate a proxy of a research-informed culture, in which participants are presented with research through the prism of someone else’s leadership or experience. They are confident in the selection of material they are being presented with, and have all read the same papers/attended the same sessions, but may perhaps be unaware of the wider limitations, complexities and debates in the field – which

However, it could also be argued that in situations of high extrinsic need (poor exam results, low inspection status), the need to prioritise and focus on a specific outcome or target addressing one (or both) of these needs might well over-ride the wider cultural development of schools. It is possible that schools with a single focus use the research as a lever to move that focus, and this reduces other extraneous and plural perspectives in the day to day teaching. This is an equally plausible explanation of the analysis; which, without further triangulation research is uncertain.

The extrinsic motivations show real drivers of the use of educational research, and of the creation of teaching and learning cultures. However, to address the final research question, it is also important to consider intrinsic motivational factors.