Collaborative research project: how students use resources

We’ve had a massive shift in job status among the Education track staff in Maths at Durham over the last five years: from mostly teaching fellows on short-term contracts, we are now ten permanent Education-track academics. With this comes a lot of stability and new opportunities for progression, and it also opens up the door for us to start doing some real scholarship.

To help get us off the ground, I’m leading the group through a collaborative research project based in using focus groups to investigate how students use different resources.

We spent Summer 2024 learning about different qualitative research methonds, the best ways to run them, and the theories used in evaluating them.

We settled on a plan to run three concurrent research projects, on the topics

• how do students use lecture notes?
• how do students interact with their feedback, and does this depend on the format?
• which external resources are students using, and how? We decided to run a focus group on each topic, and use thematic analysis to evaluate the responses.

Working together meant that we could complete each stage (ethics, data collection, transcription, analysis) at the same time as each other, but maintain enough independence that this would be a learning exercise for everyone. It’s been a particularly challenging experience for me, trying to coordinate the group, keep us on topic, and keep far enough ahead with my mathematical writing project to be able to give advice as we go.

Outputs:

Discussion of the process: Getting pedagogical research off the ground, Durham-Newcastle Pedagogy Day (Newcastle), 16 December 2024

Presentations about the process and the results at CETL-MSOR, September 2025; Durham’s Teaching and Learning Conference, September 2025; and the Department’s Research Day, September 2025.