Educational Research: What Strategies for Development in the European Research Area?

Abstract

This is a report of the "European Educational Research Journal" (EERJ) Roundtable that sought to describe what national educational research programmes are doing, how they are working together, and how they might contribute to the developing European Educational Research Space. The Roundtable was an opportunity for one large consortium of national programmes to explain their intentions and create an opportunity for dialogue. Researchers from six national research programmes (United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway and France) have been working closely to develop a cooperative decision-making system; web-based knowledge-sharing; cooperative analyses of best practice; joint examination of common policy problems and opportunities; and pilot implementation of new approaches to research training and dissemination. The discussion, chaired by Martin Lawn ("EERJ" Editor), was introduced by short contributions from Andrew Pollard (University of Cambridge), Kirsti Klette (University of Oslo) and Hannele Niemi (University of Helsinki). A response was given by Filip Dochy (University of Leuven), President of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI). There appeared to be almost universal agreement that the educational research community needs to pay greater attention to internationalisation of research processes. To this end, the collaboration of national research programmes did offer one way of achieving this through progressive interaction between partners and their associated research communities.