Learning to Research and Researching to Learn An Educator's Guide

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.