ABSTRACT
Educational research has been covered by various codes of ethics for as long as such codes have existed. The codes may include general statements that research has ‘value’, but the various values described in the codes are often left unaccounted for. In the light of a revival in recent decades of philosophical and psychological accounts of virtue – the dominant ethical discourse in ancient philosophy – this chapter is a description of research virtues that might be appropriate for educational research. Those virtues are also described as distinctively educational – that is, as promoting education, rather than being merely concerned with the topic of education. Teachers and pupils in schools can themselves be seen as researchers, exhibiting research virtues, and working alongside researchers based in higher education and other research organisations. It is the sense of research as pedagogy that illuminates a specific value of research in education – that is, its educational value.
