Funding for projects under the TLRI

Ten projects have received funding in the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative’s 2010 funding round.
The fund aims to build knowledge about teaching and learning that will lead to significantly improved outcomes for learners.
Expressions of interests for the 2010 funding round closed in May. A selection panel drew up a shortlist of applicants, who submitted a full proposal. The fund is open to the early childhood, school and post-school sectors.
The New Zealand Council for Educational Research co-ordinates the fund and its associated research programme on behalf of the Ministry of Education.
Projects are divided into two different types and into categories, with different funding levels.
The ten projects selected for funding are:

Learning journeys from early childhood into school
Project Leaders: Dr Sally Peters and Vanessa Paki
Partnerships: University of Waikato, Learning Links Early Childhood Centre, Te Totara School, Hamilton, Rewi Street Kindergarten and Te Awamutu Primary School.
This research will investigate ways of enhancing children’s learning journeys from early childhood education into school, and explore the impact of transition practices over time. It aims to help address some of the current gaps in understanding and to provide robust evidence of the longer-term impact of strategies designed to support transitions.
Funding allocation: $305,205 over three years.

Critical multiliteracies for ‘new times’
Project Leader: Dr. Susan Sandretto
Partnerships: University of Otago, Port Chalmers School, Dunedin North Intermediate, Tahuna Normal Intermediate,Fairfield School and St Hilda’s Collegiate School.
People increasingly need to be able to use a greater range of literacies, or multiliteracies, than in the past. This project will address the paucity of research in New Zealand on multiliteracies by working with teachers and students to understand how teachers can prepare students for a multiliterate future.
Funding allocation: $199,999 over two years.

Promoting pedagogical content knowledge development for early career secondary teachers in science and technology using Content Representations (CoRes)
Project Leaders: Chris Eames.
Partnerships: University of Waikato and four Early Career teachers as practitioners-researchers
This project aims to bring together science and technology content and pedagogy experts, early career teachers and researchers to design a CoRe to assist development of teacher pedagogical content and knowledge. We will then research how teachers use the CoRe in their planning and delivery of a unit in their classrooms, in order to examine the impact of the CoRe on teaching and learning.
Funding allocation: $97,248 over one year.

Every-body counts? Understanding Health and Physical Education in the primary school Project leader: Dr Kirsten Petrie.
Partnerships: University of Waikato and two decile 5 schools from Hamilton and Tauranga.
This project will examine Health and Physical Education classroom practices and what influence the complex mix of health imperatives, initiatives and policies has on these practices. The project will also explore how Health and Physical Education can be conceptualised and practiced in ways that better meet the needs of diverse learners.
Funding allocation: $200,027 over two years.

Networked Science Inquiry: An investigation in junior secondary science classrooms
Project leader: Dr Kathrin Otrel-Cass.
Partnerships: Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research (WMIER), The University of Waikato with secondary schools from Hamilton, Cambridge and Tauranga.
This research project aims to explore and theorise how inquiry teaching and learning in science can be supported through e-networked environments such as blogs or e-mail and how online resources accessed through the Internet can enable individual and group exploration of content, skills and resources.
Funding allocation: $200,298 over two years.

Integrating values in the New Zealand Curriculum: Teaching and learning strategies and their impact
Project leader: Dr Ross Notman.
Partnerships: University of Otago College of Education, Balmacewen Intermediate, Tahuna Normal Intermediate, Queens High School and Kaikorai Valley College.
This study will seek to identify strategies that schools use to implement values in their curriculum and seek to determine the impact on student values learning.
Funding allocation: $96,714 over one year.

Making authentic and trustworthy practice-based judgements of graduating student teachers
Project leader: Associate Professor Mavis Haigh.
Partnerships: The University of Auckland, Prospect, Sylvia Park, Newmarket and Point Chevalier Primary Schools.
This project investigates how four primary schools and one university work together to provide valid, reliable judgements of student teachers’ readiness to teach. The project will identify authentic, trustworthy assessment strategies and processes that enhance student teacher learning in practice and the quality of beginning teachers.
Funding allocation: $200,000 over two years.

Literacy learning in e-learning contexts: Mining the New Zealand action research evidence Project leader: Dr Vince Ham with Sue McDowall.
Partnerships: Core Education Ltd, New Zealand Council for Educational Research with practitioner-researchers from eight schools.
This cross-sector collaborative project addresses the theory to practice gap in literacy teaching and learning for the 21st Century. Researchers and ECE, primary, and secondary school teachers/action researchers will work together to analyse the data and build theory. They will draw on existing unpublished but accessible data from a range of teacher action research inquiries undertaken as part of Ministry of Education-funded e-fellowships and Early Childhood Education Information and Communication Technology Professional Learning (ECE ICT PL) programmes on e-learning over the last five years.
Funding allocation: $95,950 over one year.

“Bootstrapping” statistical inferential reasoning
Project leader: Dr Maxine Pfannkuch, Professor Sharleen Forbes and John Harraway.
Partnerships: The University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington and University of Otago.
The researchers, teachers and statistical practitioners will collaborate to devise and test learning trajectories for Year 13, Stage 1 university and workplace education. Student interviews and responses to tasks will help to develop new knowledge about how to build students’ conceptual understanding of statistical inference.
Funding allocation: $200,000 over two years.

The role of internally assessed NCEA research projects in motivating students to engage with the disciplinary features of history and to develop competence and expertise in the subject.
Project leader: Dr Mark Sheehan
Partnerships: Victoria University of Wellington with Logan Park College and Queens High School, Dunedin and Wellington East Girls’ College, Wellington.
The purpose of this study is to examine how internally-assessed, inquiry-based NCEA research projects motivate senior secondary school history students to engage with the disciplinary features of history and develop competence and expertise in the subject.
Funding allocation: $117,972 over two years.

ENDS

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