Dr Alis Oancea, University of Oxford

Alis's keynote presentation slides from iPED 2010 are now available to download.

Alis Oancea is Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Department of Education, and elected Executive Council member of the British Educational Research Association. She is member of the Peer Review College of the Economic and Social Research Council, as well as of the boards of reviewers of most major national and international bodies with an education portfolio. She has published extensively in the fields of research policy and governance - including research evaluation-, post-compulsory education and training policy, and philosophy of research, including work on contemporary issues in knowledge management.

Alis has particular interest in issues of research assessment, research quality and impact, and peer review, in the national and international contexts.  She has recently completed work on the impact of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise on education departments in the four countries of the UK and has just started a funded project on interpretations of research impact and impact-related practices across the full range of disciplines. In addition, she co-authored the synoptic report of the UK Strategic Forum for Research in Education (2010) and contributed to the shaping of the Forum’s activity. Recent publications include Assessing Quality in Applied and Practice-Based Research in Education (Routledge, 2010), and Education for All: The future of education and training for 14-19 year olds (Routledge, 2009).

Abstract

Talk: Education research and the RAE: findings from the review of the impacts of the RAE 2008 on education research
Workshop: The RAE, the REF, and the future of research assessment in the UK

The keynote talk and the follow-up workshop will draw on recent research on the impacts of the RAE 2008 on education research, including perceived impacts on education researchers’ work and careers, on departments and research units, and on the field as a whole, and comments on REF expectations. It will consider the impacts of the RAE as perceived by different categories of staff and as evidenced by the available RAE-related data and analysis. It will look at perceived immediate impacts; likely future impacts; and relative impacts across different types of institutions and (sub)fields, and over time (including the specific impact of changes in the methodology adopted for RAE in 2008).

The talk will challenge existent wisdom about the RAE on at least two counts. First, the picture emerging from the RAE 2008 study was not as evenly negative as that painted by some of the previous research on the topic (a fact which may have to do with changes in the RAE procedures and with the different kind of post-RAE 2008 settlement). Second, perceptions of the impact of the RAE among the respondents are more contextualised and mediated, thus less inclined towards direct attributions, than they had been made to seem in some of the existent literature.

During the follow-up workshop, colleagues at the conference will be invited to bring their diverse experiences of research assessment into a discussion of the future of research assessment in the UK and internationally, taking in the Research Excellence Framework, the revised procedures and criteria for the assessment of research in research council applications, the changing landscape of funding and commissioning bodies, and the emergence of trans-national systems of research assessment.