Conference Agenda

Open Science principles require that data that are collected and analysed as part of research projects are made available to other researchers at the end the project (van der Zee & Reich, 2018). This allows not only for replication, validation and generalization of research findings (van der Zee & Reich, 2018; (Tedersoo et al., 2021), but also for secondary data analyses. In general, data sharing is crucial for efficiency of scientific knowledge generation (Allen & Mehler, 2019; Nosek et al., 2015). It is also highly valuable for the individual researcher as scientific articles for which the data are published are cited more than articles for which the data are not available (Colavizza et al., 2020; Drachen et al., 2016; Piwowar et al., 2007). While in educational research more and more data are available for secondary analyses, a considerable proportion are not shared.

The proposed symposium aims at shedding more light on the factors explaining the reluctance to make data available as well as giving an overview of what can be accessed and puts an emphasis on the legal requirements. It describes the educational data landscape across several European countries and elaborates on specific legal aspects researchers struggle with. More precisely, it highlights the potential of the rich data that exist but is not (yet) available to secondary users. Often, researchers are willing to share their data but are insecure about how to make the data sharable and how to properly comply with the legal aspects, e.g. consent and copyright. Moreover, researchers are not always aware of options of restricted access and different layers of protection (including consent, anonymisation/pseudonymisation, and restricted access). Therefore, in this symposium we elaborate on challenges and best practices for sharing research data and provide practical guidance.

The symposium is a joint effort of researchers from four institutions from different European countries working on various aspects of data reuse and access to facilitate high quality educational research. The involved institutions are the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the University of Applied Sciences, Graubünden, and the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS).

The symposium consists of three contributions. The first paper takes a comparative perspective on the availability of educational research data in five European countries, namely England, Norway, France, Sweden and Switzerland. These countries are compared along a number of relevant factors with regard to data access. Based on the analysis, implications for practice are derived. The second paper provides insight into the legal challenges of data sharing in an international research project. The third paper zooms in on the topic of the GDPR, it consists of two parts. First, the GDPR and its implications on research in education are described. Then, a description of how it got implemented in the context of TIMSS 2023.

With this symposium we aim at engaging in a debate with members from Network 12 “Open Science in Education”, as well as researchers from the other networks and we encourage emerging researchers to join the debate.

In recent years, there have been huge developments in the data landscape on education and learning. This is due to several reasons. First, the ways data can be collected and analysed. In addition, research data infrastructures at both the national and international level have taken a more prominent role and guide researchers throughout the research process with regard to questions relating to data management (Corti et al., 2019). Moreover, there has been a growing understanding that sound educational policy-making requires sound evidence based on high-quality and accessible data. Many research funders now require that data resulting from funded projects will be made available at the end of the project (Logan, Hart & Schatschneider, 2021). At the same time, the legal frameworks have evolved and several countries now allow for more easy data linkages. For example, linking data from the administrations to survey data has become more common (Harron et al., 2017). In this contribution, we draw a picture of the educational research data landscape in five European countries. The aim is threefold: We provide a description of the educational data landscapes across varying contexts, compare them and derive conclusions on what can be learnt from one context to the next. The countries included in the study are England, Norway, France, Sweden and Switzerland. These countries have been selected as contrasting cases in how educational data are administered, provided and how they can be accessed by researchers. The countries also have different legal bases for working with sensitive data and vary in the degree to which data infrastructures are centralized. In order to get a complete view on the educational data landscape in these countries we have carried out interviews with experts from each of the countries. The five countries are compared along the following characteristics: (1) Main data providers (e.g. universities, statistical offices, institutional repositories); (2) Types of available data (level of education, statistical data, learning systems, competencies etc.); (3) Possibilities for data linkage; (5) Laws and Regulations. The analysis shows that there is considerable variation in terms of what data are made available, the procedures, coverage and handling. At the same time, there are some commonalities across countries. The findings allow us to draw conclusions for future directions of the educational data landscape. We make suggestions on what can be learnt from other contexts and what would facilitate high-quality data-driven educational research that could inform educational policy and practice.

Corti, L., Van den Eynden, V., Bishop, L., & Woollard, M. (2019). Managing and sharing research data: A guide to good practice (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Harron, K., Dibben, C., Boyd, J., Hjern, A., Azimaee, M., Barreto, M. L., & Goldstein, H. (2017). Challenges in administrative data linkage for research. Big data & society, 4(2), 2053951717745678. Logan, J. A. R., Hart, S. A., & Schatschneider, C. (2021, 2021/01/01). Data Sharing in Education Science. AERA Open, 7, 23328584211006475. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211006475

Effective data sharing is a crucial principle in fostering transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration in scientific research, making it a vital topic in the context of Open Science. Additionally, the ability to find, access, interoperate and reuse data is crucial for advancing scientific discovery and innovation, making it relevant to the FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). This presentation highlights the legal challenges of sharing data from international research projects using the example of a qualitative research project in German and Australian schools. The research project was accompanied by a case study. The case study analysed issues such as data protection, intellectual property and compliance to gain a better understanding of how international data sharing can be done effectively and ethically. The study provides valuable insights for anyone involved in international research projects and helps uncover potential legal challenges. In the field of educational research, data collected is often highly personal and may include minors. However, researchers in education often have little legal knowledge, it is not part of their training. Especially, in an international context, different legal regulations make it difficult to comply with data collection and sharing. To investigate this issue, we selected an international qualitative research project for a case study (Argyrou 2017; Eisenhardt 2002; Yin 2018). The international project examined a digital student exchange between Australian and German students, using video recordings, interviews, student-created videos, chat communications, digital classroom materials, and student-drawn language biographies. This raised complex legal questions about the handling of students' personal data and the handling of personal data of third parties, such as their families. Copyright issues are also key, especially when copyrighted material is to be shared as part of Open Science and used in scientific publications. For the case study, we explored the challenges and issues that arose in collecting and sharing data of the international research project as well as the resources and opportunities to find solutions through interviews and documentation analysis. In our presentation, we summarize the legal challenges of collecting and sharing research data in the international project and show examples of the measures taken to overcome these challenges. Overall, the results of our case study provide valuable insights for those involved in international educational research projects and help identify and deal with potential legal challenges.

Argyrou, A. (2017). Making the case for case studies in empirical legal research. Utrecht Law Review.org, 13(3)2017, http://doi.org/10.18352/ulr.409 Wilkinson, M. D. et al. (2016). The FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data, 3 (160018), doi: 10.1038/sdata.2016.18 (2016). Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: design and methods. Los Angeles: Sage.K. Eisenhardt, K. (2002). Building Theories from Case Study Research. In M. Huberman & M. B. Miles. The Qualitative Researcher's Companion. Los Angeles: Sage.K.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), applicable in the European Economic Area (EEA), came into force in 2018 and impacted the day-to-day activities of anyone, who handles personal data, including IEA and the network of National Research Coordinators implementing IEA comparative studies and collecting data from students, parents/guardians, teachers, and school principals. This presentation takes the view that the GDPR provides some benefits for International Educational Research and documents how IEA interpreted and implemented some of the requirements of the GDPR and the benefits of these arrangements for participants in IEA Studies, IEA data and Open Science as a whole. The first aspect we look at is the obligation to provide information to the data subject, where personal information is collected from them. The data subject must be informed inter alia about the purpose of the processing, who will process their personal, who will have access to it, would it be transferred outside of the European Economic Area, for long the personal data will be processed and where it will be stored. In the field of educational research, this obligation imposed on the data controller, benefits the research participants by respecting the child’s evolving capacities. To this end, IEA has prepared a Data Protection Declaration template, which provides participating students, their parents/guardians and teachers with the necessary information. A step further is to prepare an additional child-friendly version of these documents, targeting 4 and 8 grade students. A second aspect to consider is some of GDPR’s core principles of processing of personal data and their positive impact for International Educational Research. Respecting principles such as lawfulness, fairness and transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, integrity and confidentiality, as well as accountability strengthens the integrity and the ethics of the research and keep researchers accountable. Compliance with the GDPR also directly benefits IEA data itself, as it ensures that the collected data can be later analysed and used for research purposes. Using TIMSS 2023 as an example, this presentation seeks to show how the rules of data protection can be reconciled with the goals of Open Science to the benefit of study participants and international educational research. While IEA encourages Open Science by having IEA data publicly available, as part of the international report and the International Database (IDB), IEA also ensures that any personal data of participants is protected by adopting appropriate safeguards such as anonymization and pseudonymization techniques.

The full title of the GDPR: REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation)