Conference Agenda

Research syntheses are a meanwhile important method to gather evidence on urgent questions and to support decision-making in policy and practice worldwide (Newman & Gough, 2020, p. 4). By aggregating or configurating what has been known so far, they help not only researchers in education science but also practicioners to find concise answers to a problem or to learn about promising interventions based on clearly calculated effect sizes or the careful interpretation of qualitative research results. Research syntheses have their place in today’s research landscape in education science as a scientific and trustworthy method for synthesising research results to foster evidence-based decision-making on a specific research question. Research syntheses or systematic reviews as a scientific method of their own have gained attention during the last decades (Gough et al., 2017) and are an essential part of knowledge building. Grant and Booth (2009) identified 14 types of reviews differing in scope and method, including the systematic review that combines amongst others the stages of a systematic literature search, an appraisal of the potentially relevant studies and the synthesis of the findings (Grant & Booth, 2009, p. 102). The classification of review types can be described as multidimensional (Booth et al., 2012, p. 20) and recently, Sutton et al. (2019) came up with 48 review types classified into seven groups based on common features and goals.

Irrespective of nomenclature, all research syntheses include a process, where researchers have to decide which literature they assess as basis for their syntheses or results (Boland et al., 2017, p. 25). Within the review’s context, researchers face challenges in making decisions on the literature search process, the inclusion and exclusion criteria applied to the literature retrieved and the concrete process of the synthesis to get their evidence-based results. However, how and why researchers decide on the relevance of research papers and how the steps during a systematic review process influence one another, is not fully understood. There is consent about the fact that a careful selection of relevant literature is one of the most important decisions that influence the synthesis and the concluding findings of a review (Lefebvre et al., 2021). How reviewers in educational research are influenced by their information behaviour and comprehension of relevance elucidates the process of understanding the insights behind decisions and the motivation for including relevant studies.

Relevance assessment processes are the higher-level principle when conducting research syntheses. Yet, the notion of relevance of information resources is complex and can be best described as a relation to an object or a context being expressed in a degree of appropriateness (Saracevic, 2017) or usefulness. Another way to understand the concept of relevance is introduced by Mizzaro (1997) who distinguishes four dimensions (research query or user problem, information resources, components like context, topic or task, and time). Bringing these four dimensions together, relevance can be compared to a “point in a four-dimensional space” (Mizzaro, 1997, p. 812). In systematic review processes, researchers have to deal with degrees of relevance in view of the literature they assess. This is expressed by determining criteria that can be attributed to the foresaid dimensions. In many cases criteria can be categorised as formal relating to searching and filtering literature or as content-applied regarding the research question to be answered. But there are additional factors (e.g. subjective or environmental) that influence the reviewers’ decisions on including studies. This talk introduces a study that investigated researchers’ processes of relevance rating in research syntheses in education science. It will contribute to a better understanding of relevance decisions by researchers and their challenges when conducting syntheses.

In recent decades, the landscape of social sciences research has undergone significant transformation, driven primarily by two key trends. Firstly, the internationalisation of higher education has spurred institutions and researchers to cultivate global collaborations and engage in comparative research across diverse national contexts (Kwiek, 2021; Williamson et al., 2019). Secondly, there has been a burgeoning research focus on comprehending the dynamics of digital spaces, with a particular emphasis on the broader impact of social media (Ball & Traxler, 2023; Black et al., 2022; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2018). These interconnected trends consistently shape various facets of social sciences research today, and into the future, including its research agenda, funding allocation, research evaluation processes, and institutional frameworks for research activities, including institutional review boards (IRB) and ethics clearance processes and procedures (Hillman, 2023; Peled-Raz et al., 2021).

Ethical approval is a crucial step in the research planning process serving both as a risk management tool (McAreavey & Muir, 2011) and, in some cases, as a significant potential obstacle in project implementation (Head, 2020; Merrill & Whitsel, 2017; Taylor et al., 2020). Research has documented that the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process, which involves obtaining ethical approval for projects, is shaped not only by the study’s subject matter, but also by context sensitive research settings, and data management and protection issues (Graffigna et al., 2010; Whiteman, 2018). Additionally, ethical considerations extend to the handling of sensitive topics (Dawson et al., 2017; Vaughan, 2023; Winter & Gundur, 2024) and potential impact on young individuals (van Woudenberg et al., 2023). All these issues form an intricacy of contemporary social science research, which flexible nature often contradicts the static form of research approval (Brown, 2023).

This study serves as a reflective exploration into the process of obtaining ethical approval through institutional IRBs for an international project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project itself focuses on the analysis of youth activism, employing retrospective analysis of social media accounts of young activists and prospective inquiry using a photovoice methodology with selected sample of those young activists. Additionally, secondary school aged students are invited in freely structured group discussions on global citizenship issues. The project includes data collection across six countries: Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK, and the US.

As shown above, existing scholarship has highlighted potential challenges in research involving minors, privacy concerns related to social media, and discussions on sensitive issues. This project, having encountered these challenges on multiple levels, further invites the discussion around ethical approval processes. To do this, our paper encompasses perspectives from both junior and senior scholars participating in the project, addresses the current state of affairs in IRB approvals, and discusses the practice of implementing a large-scale cross country comparative project. Our study is framed by three key research questions:

1. To what extent do higher education institutions balance country-specific legal policies and the requirements of cross-cultural research projects?;
2. What are the perspectives of junior and senior scholars regarding the goals and processes involved in obtaining ethical approvals?; and
3. What are the primary concerns of ethical committees in the multinational projects that involve minors, sensitive issues, and the collection of data from social media?

In its 30th year, the European Association of Educational Research (EERA) unites more than 40 national associations and encompasses around 30 various networks that cluster focal themes. The annual European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) draws the participation of more than 2,000 researchers, facilitating international exchange and academic socialization. This event plays a pivotal role in advancing the concept of a "European Educational Research Space" emphasizing the culturally specific intellectual and social practices of research (Lawn, 2002; Lawn & Keiner, 2006), while acknowledging the diversity arising from national frameworks, distinct disciplinary perspectives, and a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches (Keiner, 2006; Knaupp et al., 2014). The rich diversity of ECER submissions is fundamental to the analysis of developments and various topics within educational research.

On the occasion of EERA’s 30th anniversary, we aim to put the ECER submissions at the centre of the research workshop, delving into the potentials and limitations of this corpus and presenting insights into the evolution of ECER based on these submissions. The corpus is based on a data dump provided by the EERA office and consists of more than 35,000 submissions in various presentation formats delivered to the ECER from 1998 to 2024. While this corpus offers intriguing insights into geographical, topical, network-related and temporal aspects, continued enrichment and cleansing are imperative.

Five short papers deal with the ECER submission corpus from different perspectives:

The first paper describes in detail the ECER submission corpus, outlining necessary cleansing and enrichment, and presenting basic data, including networks and geographical aspects. Further, it discusses the feasibility of establishing an open and continuously updated corpus. The second presentation explores the potentials of natural language processing methods such as topic modelling (Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004) to identify underlying themes and the topical structure of large and heterogeneous corpora. By addressing the lack of content indexing of the submissions, it focuses these questions: Which key topics can be identified from the contributions to the ECER conferences in terms of (a) their subject of research, and (b) their applied methods? How are these topics distributed across (a) the ECER networks, (b) the affiliation countries of the first author and (c) time? The third presentation adopts a detailed network perspective to the corpus. Network 10, teacher education research, analyses submissions in the long term based on bibliographic data and the generated topics, theories and methods used of the network. Since teacher education is embedded in inherently regionally anchored forms of institutionalisation, it is interesting to examine how submissions create a European communication space and how it can be characterised. The fourth paper takes a critically-engaged perspective by discussing translations and national framings of main terms of European Educational Research. The fifth contribution invites to discuss the potentials and limits of the data sources regarding knowledge production at the ECER to analyse new practices, partnerships of research, cross-national work and new subjects.

These five papers, each presenting a unique perspective, serve as the starting point for a lively discussion of the benefits of the corpus and potential outcomes.

Networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

Knowledge produced by research has a social value. Much of it can serve as a guide to more effective behaviours and practices for users whether practicing professionals or decision-makers. Furthermore, the use of research to improve educational practices has become a lively political and scientific debate since the concepts of evidence-based education or evidence-informed education were developed in Europe and the United States, then within international organizations (Gaussel, et al., 2017). Thus, for the past twenty years, the IFÉ (Institut français de l’Éducation) has been developing a mediation activity between research and educational practices. In this context, IFÉ’s Veille et Analyses team has been focusing its work on the role of intermediaries in the transfer of research knowledge through a mediation or transformation process (Gaussel, 2014).

In this presentation, we propose to explore a conceptual framework for a mediation process for knowledge to be disseminated in the field of educational research and address some specific issues raised in the research literature on the matter:

- RQ1: What does characterize a mediation process?

- RQ2: processed in perspective, what implications could emerge for intermediaries and mediators in terms of brokering competencies?

Theoretical framework:

In Europe and other parts of the world, it has long been accepted that educational research can be very useful in improving educational policy and practice (Farley-Ripple, 2018; Godfrey & Brown, 2018; Weiss, 1979) ; at the same time, educational research is criticized for not being sufficiently in tune with practice (Malin & Brown, 2019; Cooper & Shewchuk, 2015), while teachers show great resistance in implementing research findings (Draelant & Revaz, 2022). The gap between research and practice has many causes, and at its root lie deep social, cultural and structural fractures, particularly when research dissemination is perceived as linear, unidirectional and potentially disempowering for practitioners – asking researchers to better disseminate work or teachers to better engage with research has not been particularly successful to date (Rycroft-Smith, 2022) –and therefore ineffective (Farley-Ripple & Grajeda, 2019; Malin & Brown, 2019).

Previous work on knowledge transfer – an interdisciplinary concern about how to disseminate knowledge created by research – has indeed shown that the development of a scientific mediation process between research producers and users (whether field actors or policy-makers) could be relevant to bridging the gap between these two communities (Cooper & Shewchuk, 2015; Hering, 2016; Turnhout, et al., 2013; Ward, 2017) and reinforce the usability of scientific knowledge. However, knowledge transfer goes through a mediation process that goes beyond a simple push towards those concerned (from researchers to decision-makers, from researchers to practitioners, from researchers to the general public).

A mediation process actually involves a number of tasks that complement each other. It is a composite interface that includes searching for information, evaluating that information, cross-referencing and interpreting the results, identifying emerging issues or, on the contrary, blind spots related to the studied subject; It means making knowledge appropriable, exploitable and usable (Meyer, 2010). This idea is echoed by many researchers, for whom mediation contexts play a key role: it is not enough for teachers to be aware of research that has proved its value, the conditions must be provided for them to change their practices as well (Gaussel, et al., 2017). The requirement to develop a simple and effective means of promoting research knowledge is reinforced by the need to find a way of translating scientific results and, consequently, to strengthen the operational links between education professionals and research producers through a mediation process, one of which is knowledge brokering.

The importance of sharing knowledge research, practice and policy in education is well recognized. Still, a notable gap among these areas in the field of education has been observed (Rycroft-Smith 2022, Levin 2013). Researchers and decision makers addressing this situation, are faced with a complex problem that spans from agreeing on a mutual understanding of knowledge and its application, to navigating the boundaries between diverse domains, and includes the identification, implementation, and evaluation of effective transfer methods (Levin 2013, McMahon, Legget & Carroll 2022). Intermediaries such as individuals, teams, organizations and initiatives have been identified as crucial in facilitating knowledge transfer by connecting researchers, practitioners and decision makers (Malin & Brown 2020, MacKillop, Quarmby & Downe 2020). Digital platforms can also act as intermediaries by creating a centralized space where different communities are brought together. Their basic function in the transfer process is to provide access to knowledge, structuring knowledge and interlinking it (Bernhard-Skala, Sonnenmoser & Tombeil 2023). Furthermore, they have the potential to offer new communication channels and complementary mediated types of transmission, enabling alternate access to knowledge (Bernhard-Skala, Sonnenmoser & Tombeil 2023). Their function in the transfer process is at the same time limited to the features they provide for their users thus setting boundaries to the production, dissemination and use of knowledge (Hartong & Decupere 2023).In our research, we tap into the intermediary role of a specific set of digital platforms in Europe in the context of knowledge transfer. We focus on infrastructures that disseminate information on education that is open and freely accessible to all. We consider this openness a prerequisite for their role as intermediaries - in contrast for example to digital learning platforms which are typically available only to a selected group of users, thereby establishing an initial barrier to knowledge transfer. Our investigation concentrates on ducation servers which we define as state-initiated platforms with a national scope. They were established to collect, produce, organize and distribute educationally relevant information, making it available to a broad public (Kühnlenz et al. 2012, Ramsayer & Lorenz 2001/02). Over time they have expanded their services to include specific portals, e.g. for learning materials, for training or for specific educational formats as well as incorporating new communication formats and channels, enhancing their intermediary capabilities. The German Education server is an example of such an approach. It primarily curates web resources in the field of education and instructional materials created by different agents. Educational research is presented in terms of interviews, podcasts and blog entries as well as curated lists of links including research publications. All of these information objects are open and freely accessible to scholars, educational professionals, educators, students, and the general public. Thus, the portal primarily forges connections between different communities via the presentation of information objects. In its function as a referatory and repository, the portal is a boundary object in itself. Boundary objects enable individuals from diverse backgrounds to utilize or draw from the collective resource pool for their own purposes thus connecting different communities (Monod-Ansaldi, Vincent & Aldon, Wenger 1998, Star & Griesemer 1998). By analyzing education servers and other information portals that act as intermediaries, we seek to understand how the European information landscape adapts to the growing demand for knowledge transfer. Our investigation will shed light on the practices of digital platforms that connect educational communities in Europe, underlining the potential and the limitations of these platforms as promoters of knowledge transfer in education.

This paper presents the theoretical and methodological approach of a stakeholder mapping study in the field of open educational resources (OER) in Germany. The study is a component of the OERinfo project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as the central information office for OER in Germany (www.o-e-r.de). The objective of the mapping study is to identify new actors and communities in diverse educational domains that have limited prior engagement with OER. These groups are later to be introduced to the discussion and communities surrounding OER and Open Educational Practices (OEP) through information and advisory services by OERinfo its partners. Overall, this approach aims to promote the mainstreaming of OER and OEP across all educational sectors.

OER are essentially defined as openly available and reusable, mainly digital learning, teaching and research materials (UNESCO, 2019; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2023), while OEP are defined „as practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path“ (Ehlers, 2011, p. 6).

The assumed benefits of OER are that the improved accessibility, adoption and adaptability of learning materials increase the quality and efficiency of education (Janssen et al., 2023). Learning settings and educational programs can thus be better adapted to the needs of different learners, collaboration between and within institutions is promoted, and educational innovation is encouraged (Janssen et al., 2023). On the level of educational processes, OER stand for an ecosystem-focused approach in which the learner's learning environment is given special consideration (Janssen et al., 2023). It is also assumed that OER help to develop collaborative and participatory learning arrangements (Otto, 2020). On a global level, OER are seen as an important prerequisite for building inclusive knowledge societies and achieving UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" (UNESCO, 2019, p. 4).

Despite these expectations, and despite the boost of digitalization in education in many countries caused by the COVID 19-pandemic, OER have not yet spread in education systems and educational practice to the extent hoped for – both globally (Janssen et al., 2023), but especially in Germany (Orr et al., 2018). The following reasons are cited as the main obstacles: Users being overwhelmed by legal issues (Otto, 2019), lack of appropriate OER policies, funding problems, lacking knowledge and skills about using, developing and publishing OER, worries about additional time investment (Janssen et al., 2023), and uncertainty over the quality and appropriateness of the content (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2023). The OERinfo project attempts to help break down these barriers with its information and advisory measures. However, in order to reach the right target groups, the mapping of OER stakeholders presented here is planned.

There are already various mapping and overview studies on the status of the adoption and use of OER by educational stakeholders in Germany (Ebner et al., 2015; Orr et al., 2018) as well as a comprehensive collection of people, projects, organizations and offers in the field of OER through the OER World Map (Neumann & Muuß-Merholz, 2017; Mollenhauer & Grimm, 2023). However, these studies and sources concentrate primarily on presenting active players and existing offers in the OER sector, so that they provide only few clues for the identification of specific desiderata groups. Since such groups are not explicitly visible through activities, projects or publications in connection with OER, a comprehensive and up-to-date view on educational institutions and actors in Germany is necessary. This is what the presented mapping study aims to achieve.