Investigating the ‘research-teaching nexus’

To better understand how teachers engage with and in research, we would like to find out more information about the following:

1. the conditions of your working environment: for example, whether research engagement is appreciated or facilitated in your place of work.
2. your attitudes towards research engagement: for example, we would like you to tell us whether you find such activity interesting, challenging etc.
3. your practices related to research engagement: for example, we are interested in finding out whether you have read or produced research.

To help us better understand teacher research engagement, we would be grateful if you could fill out a short questionnaire. We are keen to hear from educators who come from a variety of national contexts, and who belong to diverse age groups and levels of experience, including student teachers. We are especially keen to hear from teachers who actively teaching or studying, and people who are also interested in the enrichment of their existing knowledge through research.

We believe that each teacher is different, but also that many of us tend to share some of our individual traits. We want to use your data to see whether there are any salient ‘clusters’ of situations, attitudes, and practices that occur together. By studying your responses, we hope that we can eventually suggest ways of research engagement that are more suitable to each distinct teacher profile.

To make our study as useful as possible, we need as many responses as we can get. That is why we would very much appreciate any help you can give us. However, whether you participate or not is completely up to you. Even if you have been forwarded this survey by a teacher or employer, you should only complete it if you are happy to do so. We will not share information about participation with anyone.

If you would like to participate, you can do so by filling in a short online questionnaire. You can do this on your computer or on a smartphone. In our experience, completing the questionnaire will take approximately 10 minutes of your time. You do not have to fill out any questions that you prefer not to answer.

We may approach some participants for a follow-up interview. When completing the questionnaire, you will be given the choice to opt in or out of this stage of the study.

The time when you fill out the questionnaire is up to you. This means that you can respond to the questions whenever you believe that you can spare 10 minutes. However, we would appreciate responses before the 29^th February 2024.

Unfortunately, we cannot remunerate for your time, even though we appreciate your assistance deeply. However, participants who provide us with an email address will be entered in a raffle for a 20 Euro book coupon, as a token of appreciation.

Aside from that, we hope that the questions of the questionnaire might help you to reflect on your ideas about education research, and perhaps suggest alternative ways of thinking about it.

Except for your email, which you may provide us if you agree to participate in the raffle for a book coupon, no personally identifying information will be collected. All the data that you provide us will be treated with confidentiality. Your responses to the questionnaire will not be associated with your identity. Any publications stemming from this survey will report on the data anonymously as statistical aggregates.

The survey fully complies with the University of Thessaly ethics guidelines, EU and Greek legislation regarding data privacy (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation), and the Ethics Standards of the American Psychological Association. In brief, this means that (a) we take steps to disassociate any personally identifying information from your responses, (b) we will not share identifying information with any third party unless obliged to by law or a court order, (c) data will be stored in password protected university servers in EU territory, (d) any hard copies of data will be stored under reasonable measures of physical security (e.g., locked cabinets), and (e) hardware used for the project will be swept clean of data before being sent for any maintenance or disposal.

We expect to publish an article based on the data within 2024. We will retain your responses on record for a period of five years after the publication of the article, for reasons of academic accountability. We will only retain your email until the we have completed the follow-up interview phase, which we expect to happen by June 2024.

There are no foreseeable physical or psychological risks associated with taking part in this online survey.

• Should you have any concerns about the study or your participation in it, in the first instance you should contact Dr Achilleas Kostoulas (ackostoulas[at]uth[dot]gr). Your concerns will be confidentially discussed, appropriate rectifying actions will be taken, and a record of the incident will be made reasons of accountability.
• If your concerns are not resolved to your satisfaction, you can contact the University of Thessaly Ethics board (ehde[at]uth[dot]gr).
• Agreeing to participate in this study does not in any way limit your legal rights. You should discuss any legal concerns you may have with the Hellenic Data Protection Authority (contact[at]dpa[dot]gr).