Involving staff and students in research
By Paul Jackson, Head of Student Support and Development Service, University of Leicester, and Professor Kate Purcell, Director of the Futuretrack Survey Programme at the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick.
This workshop presented a project initiated and developed at the Putting Research Outcomes into Practice (PROP) workshop and subsequently by Paul Jackson and Kate Purcell, to initiate a general discussion about the potential to improve communication and mutually-useful collaboration between researchers and careers practitioners.
The presenters described how the project has been built around the current Futuretrack longitudinal study of full-time higher education UCAS applicants, beginning with the design and testing of the Stage 2 online questionnaire, to be released in summer 2007 at the end of what, for most of the original 130,000 respondents at Stage 1, was their first year of higher education (see footnote). The careers teams at the universities of the West of England, Leicester, Warwick and Westminster signed up to work with the researchers and in Spring 2007, set up questionnaire-testing workshops where first year students were recruited and given a small incentive to spend an hour working through the draft questionnaire, discussing their experience of doing so, and how well they felt the questionnaire worked in terms of the issues covered and the format of questions. For the research team, this identified weaknesses and ambiguities in the questionnaire. The range of student experiences provided at these different universities clarified where questions did and did not work for different kinds of students: those on lab-based rather than library and seminar-based courses, those with a strong vocational work-based element, and the perspectives of students in different situations - for example, studying as a mature or overseas student. It was only in testing the questionnaire that the complexity of some of these issues - and refinements to research design required to take account of them - became clear.
The benefits to the research team are obvious. In addition, several of the careers consultants who had participated in these exercises were at the workshop and described how they had found the discussions that followed the questionnaire-completion revealed insights into students’ understanding of career planning, awareness of their services and information needs. In the longer-term, they appreciated how the workshops were contributing to better research design and the likelihood that better, more useful information would be produced as a result.
The conference workshop generated an enthusiastic response for such activities and it was apparent that the lessons learned from this exercise could be ‘rolled out’ to other careers advisers and researchers via AGCAS workshops, or to specific careers advisory professionals in different higher education institutions or regions, using relevant research to develop effective working partnerships.
The next phase of the project, a programme of day-long ‘work-shadowing’ meetings between members of the research and careers advisory teams has already begun and promises to be equally valuable to all concerned.
Footnote
For key findings of Stage 1 of Futuretrack, see the article Embarking on higher education (II) – the bigger picture
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