While we all like to make changes in our teaching and try out different approaches, these initiatives may not transfer well to research contexts. This means that your research topic and approach need to be innovative, offer a new perspective on an existing topic or apply something that has been done in a different discipline to your discipline, and for the first time. 

A key starting point is to conduct a search of generic and discipline-specific literature. This process can seem aimless if you do not have a method for carrying out this scoping exercise. Poirier (2014) provides a comprehensive overview of searching the higher education literature, with a focus on, but not exclusive to, the health sciences using the WHEEL process.

Where:

As with all research work we carry out, searching the literature is the key to discovering whether a topic has been explored before. UCD’s Library Guide for Education is a very useful resource for finding books and journal articles, as well as searching databases, government websites, and datasets relating to educational topics. You might find the Academic Search Complete database a good starting point for general searches as it houses many of the higher education teaching and learning journals, both generic and discipline-specific. Or perhaps you would find discipline-specific databases of help, for example: Social Science Citation Index; Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Medline (OVID); CINAHL Plus; or Web of Science.

Poirier’s (2014) article presents a table listing key teaching and learning journals and their inclusion in popular databases. As teaching and learning research spans many databases, it may be easier to find a number of articles and to utilise the reference list to source additional articles, books or websites. Poirier calls this ancestry searching. See our section on Getting Published for some key journals you could start with.

How:

The process of searching is cyclical and Poirier (2014) emphasises that it is a systematic and dynamic process. Having refined the research question (Clarifying Your Research Question), you can now begin to determine key concepts and their search terms, for example what is meant and measured by terms like ‘engagement’, ‘impact’, ‘affect’, ‘attitude’ or ‘performance’. Your search should explore international and Irish government publications such as those produced by the Higher Education Authority, the Department of Education and Skills or The National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Manual searches and discussions with experts in different topic areas will highlight both literature to support your research as well as relevant conference and research publication outputs, as you will want to avoid those that may not have high impact factors.

Appraising Evidence:

Different disciplines will set out criteria to aid researchers like you in establishing the best evidence to include in a research article (Harden et al., 1999). One way that you might examine the level of the research impact of various articles is to apply the four levels presented by Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick (2005). These levels have been widely used for evaluating training, but could be also helpful in judging the level of impact of teaching innovations.

 

Level			Example measures for teaching and learning research
Level 1	Reaction	How participants react to the experiences	Measured by student satisfaction surveys, often described as ‘happy sheets’
Level 2	Learning	The extent to which students change attitudes, increase knowledge or skills	Measured by focus groups, interviews, attitudinal scales, grades or performance in class.
Level 3	Behaviour	The extent to which behaviour occurs on the job	Measured by focus groups, interviews, performance in practice/work/internships of following graduation
Level 4	Results	The final outcomes that occur as a  result of the educational experience	Measured by focus groups, interviews, standardised measures, impact on policy, costings, society, social changes.
Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick (2005)			See for examples of tools for more information

Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick Levels of Research Impact