ABSTRACT
A press release announcing the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) launch of a 1.5 million fund to improve use of research in schools reads: The Government wants teachers to be able to use research to inform their practice and raise standards in schools, believing that the use of robust evidence will help improve the quality of teaching and support a school-led system. The most likely methods for collecting your data will be observation, diaries, journals and field notes, documentary sources, questionnaires and interviews. In research terms, education is sometimes linked with medicine: for example, the systematic literature reviews in education followed the lead of the Cochrane Collaboration in synthesising evidence. Action research was taken up in education in the 1950s, specifically by the teaching profession and particularly in the United States. Various researchers have noted that there are no obvious ways for analysing qualitative data.
