Engaging with research can be a focus in itself for practitioners, and it is an informative and essential step for engaging in research. The main ways that educators can engage with research include attending professional learning opportunities presented by researchers or experts in a field, attending conferences and reading professional journals or research-based literature. This chapter looks at the importance of engagement with research literature as a critical consumer. In this chapter, we will focus first on strategies for locating and accessing current research literature, reading and summarising literature, and analysing and evaluating research literature – key considerations when reading research as a critical consumer. The chapter also focuses on how to construct a literature review. We consider the use of literature to identify and narrow a broad field of interest to a more refined topic, and return to the discussion about research questions, with a focus on their refinement as a result of reading research literature and writing the literature review. Finally, the chapter introduces the academic writing style and provides guidelines for citations and referencing.

In this chapter, we deal with practical considerations that need to be taken into account when planning practitioner research. Initial planning for practitioner research requires considerable thought as to the logistics of the proposed undertaking. The process for pre-service teachers is often guided by the requirements of assessment, while in-service educators are less constrained and less often guided by others. We continue the focus on practical considerations by revisiting the research questions, noting the practical considerations that are involved when formulating initial questions and planning a research project. The other important practicalities of research dealt with in this chapter are ethics and ethical approval – essential considerations that are central to any research. Ethical principles and application processes are the focus of the latter part of the chapter.

This chapter deals with the challenges, opportunities and potential outcomes of practitioner research. It reconnects with the ideas of Chapters 2 and 3 to allow readers to reflect on the practicalities of practitioner research in terms of challenges and opportunities. Rather than present the challenges as barriers to practitioner research, the chapter discusses approaches that may enable practitioner researchers to reflect on the challenges and develop strategies for managing or minimising their impact. Just as it is important to acknowledge that practitioner research is not without certain challenges (as is the case with any research), it is essential to focus on the opportunities that practitioner research affords educators; we describe what we believe to be the major sources of opportunity in this chapter. The final section of the chapter provides authentic examples of outcomes of practitioner research in multiple contexts as a means to illustrate the possibilities that practitioner research offers when educators complete their research projects.

This chapter deals with the synthesis and discussion of findings with a view to answering the research questions. In the previous chapters we focused on designing and conducting the research project, so at this stage, we are assuming you have collected and analysed your data, and are ready to write about them. At the heart of many practitioner research projects is the goal of gathering data to promote or support evidence-based decision-making in classrooms or schools. Whatever your purpose, formulating the different aspects of the discussion is an important step in the research process. It is not a simple task to provide instructions on how to write a discussion – we believe this is best achieved by providing examples to illustrate the ideas and through your own writing practice. As this chapter proceeds, we will focus on the different aspects of the discussion, using case studies to illustrate each of them.

The focus of this chapter is on disseminating practitioner research. It emphasises the reasons why dissemination of research is important and discusses why practitioners should write about their research work. In this chapter, we present a number of ideas for dissemination, including informal avenues of dissemination (such as school-level presentations), as well as more formal means, including journal articles (for both research and professional journals) and conference presentations (oral and poster). The focus on academic writing in Chapter 4 will be extended in this chapter to include writing and structural conventions common to more formal dissemination genres (such as articles and conference papers). This chapter will also revisit the ethical considerations introduced in Chapter 3 to consider ethics regarding the dissemination of results.

This chapter covers compensating differentials, the theoretical foundation for most of the book. The key idea follows from Chapter 1's broad definition of compensation as “everything a worker likes about the job”. Jobs have many positive and negative characteristics, and workers vary in how much they value (or dislike) these characteristics. Positive job characteristics are a form of non-monetary pay, and negative characteristics diminish a worker’s effective pay. Holding other job characteristics constant, workers must be paid more to compensate them for a particular negative job characteristic and, similarly, are willing to accept less monetary pay when they enjoy a particular positive job characteristic. Workers sort across different jobs and employers based on their preferences for those job characteristics. The size of the wage differential (arising from a particular job characteristic) that occurs in the market is determined by the “marginal worker's” preferences for that job characteristic. Through a series of extensive examples, the reader is led to a thorough understanding of the marginal worker and compensating differentials, concepts which recur throughout the book.

This chapter connects pay to the important (and costly, from an organizational standpoint) subject of employee turnover. It opens by discussing how the level of pay relates to workers’ turnover rates. A discussion of the timing of compensation (over the course of the worker’s career or tenure with the employer) follows, the key point being that deferred compensation encourages retention. Employers might renege on deferred-pay contracts, which introduces risk for workers. The chapter covers workers’ perceptions of risk as they pertain to the timing and design of pay and to sorting effects. When pay is deferred, workers sometimes advance to a career stage in which their pay outpaces their productivity, at which time employers would like them to quit. Inducing workers to leave can be tricky, particularly given the external and internal constraints covered in Chapters 4 and 5. Sections 12.5 and 12.6 concern severance packages and buyouts, which basically involve paying workers to leave. The conditions under which such payments are offered and accepted are covered. The chapter ends with coverage of corporate raids and when a manager should match an outside offer received by an employee.

There are many tools and techniques that a data scientist is expected to know or acquire as problems arise. Often, it is hard to separate tools and techniques. One whole section of this book (four chapters) is dedicated to teaching how to use various tools, and, as we learn about them, we also pick up and practice some essential techniques. This happens for two reasons. The first one is already mentioned here – it is hard to separate tools from techniques. Regarding the second reason – since our main purpose is not necessarily to master any programming tools, we will learn about programming languages and platforms in the context of solving data problems.