Living in a 2.2 World: ERA, Capacity Building and the Topography of Australian Educational Research

Abstract

Early in 2011, the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) and the Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) established a joint working party to create a strategic plan for strengthening national research capacity in the field of Education. This proposal followed the publication of Excellence of Research in Australia (ERA) 2010 results, which revealed that the national average weighting of Australian research in Field of Research 13 (FoR 13) - Education was well below the 'world standard' rating of 3.0. Moreover, the 2010 ERA data demonstrated that we had no up-to-date picture of who is involved in educational research, what their strengths are, or how they relate to one another. As an input into strategic research capacity building in Australian educational research, this project begins the process of documenting who 'we' are as educational researchers. The research described within the report used an ecological model to address the project's overarching question, which was: What is the topography of Australian educational research