Juxtalearn: Evaluating ways of capturing engagement processes

Posted on Tuesday, 7 July 2015 by Gill Clough

Liz Hartnett, Gill Clough and Anne Adams, The Open University

This blog post was jointly authored by Liz Hartnett, Gill Clough and Anne Adams. The authors worked together on a European Union-funded project called Juxtalearn. Anne Adams was also one of the Co-Investigators on the OU’s Engaging Research Seed Funding Scheme with a particular interest in the generation and collection of evidence of the social impacts from research.

Project Summary
The Juxtalearn project was setup to help identify barriers to understanding by focusing on creative performance, provoking student curiosity through video making activities that contrast with the standard teaching activities.

We aimed to use the Public Engagement with Research Catalyst seed funding to develop and evaluate a variety of engagement data collection tools, with regard to their richness in informing us about engagement and its effects for teachers, students and researchers.

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The impact of key working for families and children with special educational needs

Posted on Friday, 3 July 2015 by John Oates

John Oates, The Open University; Silvana Mengoni, University of Hertfordshire; and Janet Bardsley, The Open University

This blog post was jointly authored by John Oates, Silvana Mengoni and Janet Bardsley. The authors applied to the OU’s Engaging Research Seed Funding Scheme to explore the impact of their research into ‘key working’.

Project summary
Key working is a way of supporting families of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), which enables the implementation of the Children and Families Act and Code of Practice (September 2014).

The ‘Developing Key Working’ booklet (the Guide) was produced as the primary output from a research project funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and commissioned through the National Children’s Bureau. This commission included providing the Guide as a print-ready file to be printed and distributed by the Council for Disabled Children.

Our seed funded project was based on the Council for Disabled Children widely disseminating the Guide, with an emphasis on exploring its uptake among potential users who might not have been sufficiently aware previously of approaches to key working in relation to the new legislative frameworks.

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Collecting evidence from research-informed practices: the case of Floodplain Meadows

Posted on Friday, 3 July 2015 by Emma Rothero

Emma Rothero, Gareth Davies and Jim McGinlay, The Open University

This post was jointly authored by Emma Rothero, Gareth Davies and Jim McGinlay

We applied to the OU’s Engaging Research Seed Funding Scheme based, in part, on the track record of engagement built up over a number of years through the Floodplain Meadows Partnership. In participating in this scheme as part of the OU’s Public Engagement with Research Catalyst we wanted to share some of our experiences in generating evidence of the impacts from engaged research. Of course, we also wanted to learn from other researchers trying to achieve the same ends.

Project aims
The aims of our study were to understand:

the role of site-specific advice provided by the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, in the process of translating scheme goals to practical actions;
the extent to which the government funded HLS agri-environment schemes benefit species-rich floodplain meadows;
the effectiveness of these schemes in creating new species-rich floodplain meadows.

Cricklade Floodplain Meadow. Credit: Mike Dodd and Emma Rothero

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Engaging Research

An Open Research University: Embedding public engagement within the research culture of the OU

Monthly Archives: July 2015

Juxtalearn: Evaluating ways of capturing engagement processes

The impact of key working for families and children with special educational needs

Collecting evidence from research-informed practices: the case of Floodplain Meadows