The UK educational evidence portal (eep) is an online resource providing easy access to published research and evidence-based guidance across all areas of education, and related aspects of children’s services. It was developed through collaboration between organisations to make research evidence more widely available to a range of audiences, including educational professionals, practitioners, policy makers and the research community.[1]
History
The portal went live in September 2007 and is funded by a number of organisations, including CfBT Education Trust, DCSF, BIS, TDA, Becta and The National College. It is hosted by the EPPI-Centre at the Institute of Education, University of London and managed by a Development Group which meets approximately bi-monthly. A subset of this group meets as the Editorial Group which manages the content of the portal. CfBT Education Trust provides overall leadership.[2]
The portal has been cited as a useful information resource by various academic and Government sources in the UK and elsewhere.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
Searching
Eep can be searched in the following ways:
- Search websites - collections of documents from areas of a wide range of organisations contributing to eep[10]
- Search eep database - individual documents that have been selected by a subset of organisations and indexed in greater detail by the British Education Index[11]
- Explore key documents and links in specialised Resource Areas which focus on specific topics or educational communities.[12]
Development
Eep is currently developing the next release of the portal which will improve the search results for both new and more experienced users. There will be a subject list for browsing the database. Authors' names and British Education Thesaurus terms will be clickable so that related documents in the database are linked. A new text mining tool will provide automatic subject tags, on the fly, for both the database and website search.
References
- ^ Saunders, L. (2007) Educational Research and Policy-Making: Exploring the Border Country Between Research and Policy. Routledge, p. 100.
- ^ About eep (eep web site)
- ^ Thomas, G. (2009) How to Do Your Research Project: A Guide for Students in Education and Applied Social Sciences Sage Publications, p. 35.
- ^ Bubb, S., Earley, P. (2010) Helping Staff Develop in Schools. SAGE Publications, p. 20.
- ^ NFER information sites
- ^ Oxford University Department of Education - Where to start for information for education
- ^ Aussie Educator: Education Search Engines
- ^ DCSF Research Website - links
- ^ The Council of the European Union: Commission document SEC (2007) 1098, p. 47
- ^ eep web sites search
- ^ eep database search
- ^ eep resource areas