Introduction

What does excellence in research mean to you? You may see awards given out for Excellence in Research, or maybe notice it as a component of an institutional mission or philosophy, but it can be hard to parse out what it really means across disciplines and fields. For faculty members the goal of producing excellent high-quality research on learning is often an integral part of their daily work, requiring immense amounts of time and consideration. Additionally, high-quality pedagogical research can impact the direction of higher education and create opportunities for international development of learning and teaching techniques, and it is just as essential to be able to seek out and identify high-    quality research as it is to contribute to it. It can be useful to consider how you professionally define excellence in research, as well as how your field conceptualizes it in order to stay on track with your research goals. Although we cannot define the multifaceted concept of excellence in education research easily, this blog post will describe some of the key components that may signify excellence particularly in pedagogical research  by utilizing guidelines and standards published by professional organizations and publications in the field.

Preparation

Successful research project members consider its place amongst the current and future outlook of the field, creating a high-quality contribution throughout the process. Considering timeliness (is this a topic that can serve to answer current conceptual  issues in the field?) and relevance (are there clear connections to actual practice?) can help establish a need. Both of these elements can cultivate a case for originality of research, although as the article “What Constitutes High Quality Higher Education Pedagogical Research?” points out, replication studies are works of scholarship that have been overlooked in the pedagogical literature and are essential to determining transferability across contexts and locales. Although these considerations will likely be weaved throughout the entirety of the research process, it is important they are included early on as a foundation. 

Research Study Design

High-quality research projects are methodologically rigorous, meaning they make the effort to ground their design in logical and relevant frameworks and methods. The design of a research process can take a good deal of background research on the relevant theoretical and conceptual frameworks on which a study is underpinned. Whichever methodological approach used, whether that be quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, phenomenological etc. should be thoroughly justified in the scholarship and well described within your final product. Utilizing relevant protocols, standards, and frameworks in your research design can promote excellence across the field by maintaining a consistent level of credibility. Additionally, developing a methodology that can be replicated is essential to cultivating excellence in a research community, which can be achieved through meticulous attention to detail in your design. To explore some guidelines and frameworks for different types of study design check out Appendix B in the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development.

Data Collection and Analysis

Faulty data collection or observation can lead to misinterpreted results and unfounded conclusions. Taking the necessary steps to achieve ethical collection of data in whatever method you have chosen is a key component in creating an excellent research study. This includes anonymizing data, taking care in your data storage and purging practices, carefully monitoring for bias, and most importantly following internal protocols by your institution and government for gathering data from human subjects. Working closely with your Institutional Review Board and working through all of their processes can be key in this. In the analysis stage, focusing on how these results can relate to actual practice will create an opportunity to problem solve and present solutions in the field based on your results. It is important to draw those connections between your results and actual practice or else it is data collection for its own sake. 

Impact and Reach

Although we cannot accurately determine the quality of research by any given metric of impact, it can be useful to consider how a research article or project’s reach relates to its excellence. One way to track this is to utilize cited reference searching for both your own works and works that you are reading. Cited reference searching allows you to see how often a given article is cited across the literature, and there are many tools available to look into this (Google Scholar and Web of Science are two search engines that have this function built in). There are other ways of viewing the impact of a work as well: policy changes, implementation of practices supported by the research in classrooms, social media mentions, as well as simply word of mouth within your scholarly community. 

There are also ways to encourage widening the reach of your research by presenting at conferences, sharing your dataset in an open data repository, and ensuring that the study has replicability that can be transferred to other contexts. 

Conclusion

The table below demonstrates a couple of key traits of what the author deems “Pragmatic” research, the kind that focuses on relevance to the field and methodological rigor. By tracing some of the characteristics of typically high quality data, we can move closer and closer to that sector of the graph. However, there are many ways a researcher can strive for high-quality research that go beyond the discussion today. Additionally, there are vastly different understandings of research excellence across individualized fields. Noticing the markers of excellence within other’s work can help pinpoint some of those traits of truly high quality research. 

Resources

Standards for Excellence in Education Research by the Institute of Education Sciences

Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development by the Institute of Education Sciences, Department of Education and the National Science Foundation

Evans, C., Kandiko Howson, C., Forsythe, A., & Edwards, C. (2021). What constitutes high quality higher education pedagogical research? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(4), 525–546. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1790500