Research literacy in practice:

Teachers’ motives for reading and using research

Abstract

The Swedish Education Act states that education should be based on scientific grounding and proven experience. The basic idea is that teaching based on research will be both better and more effective. To be able to fulfil this, teachers need research literacy, an ability to understand, evaluate, and use research for practice. Earlier research has to a large extent focused on barriers and prerequisites for teachers’ utilisation of research for teaching. Scholars suggest that teachers need to take an active role in the process of integrate research and practice. However, the knowledge about what teachers need to know to fulfil this and what motivates them, is still sparse.

This paper aims to contribute knowledge on what aspects of research literacy appear when teachers talk about how they use research related to their teaching. Two research questions have been posed: 1) what motives do teach-ers have for reading research?, 2) which aspects of research literacy emerge when teachers talk about research use?

13 experienced teachers have been interviewed. They work at different levels in Swedish schools and teach different subjects. The research follows good research practice according to the Swedish Research Council. The audio recorded interviews have been transcribed and analysed using content analy-sis. The analysis was based on self-determination theory and research literacy.

The results indicate that intrinsic motivation is important for the partici-pating teachers’ research use. When they search for, read, and use research, the teachers appear to experience a sense of autonomy, competence and be-longing. Furthermore, there are indications that the sense of belonging is strengthened when teachers read and discuss research together with their colleagues. Their sense of competence is strengthened since they experience that reading research extends their vocabulary and helps them to put into words what happens in the classroom. 

The results also show that another driving force for research engagement is altruistic motivation. The teachers describe that they read research to be able to make the best teaching for their students. The teachers want to be-come better and develop their competence because they meat students with different backgrounds and different prerequisites to learn.

In conclusion, different motives for using research leads to different active-ties connected to research literacy. On one hand, when teachers are intrinsic-cally motivated, they tend to search for, read, and use research for teaching. On the other hand, extrinsically motivated teachers tend to read research, but do not talk about that they use it.