User:Undurthy/My Sandbox for Patricia/template:Teacher Preparation/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
This training programme is intended for educational functionaries of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattishgarh. In recent times the state level and district level educational functionaries are carrying out a lot of research and academic activities with a view to improve quality of education. They are submitting reports after completion of their academic/research activities but state directorate of education felt that these reports are mechanical and redundant in presenting the work. Though there are substantial and potential research efforts, due to lack of proper reporting and documentation, they are not put to context specific practices.

Any academic activity is purposeful and deliberate to gain new insights that would in turn help in policy decisions for quality improvement. While reporting the academic activities, it is necessary that the educational functionaries are clear in their conception of why the particular academic activity is initiated. Ideas and insights would ignite the academician to undertake an academic activity that yield to establish evidences for truth claims. These evidences are helpful in taking certain decision in improving quality of education. Hence epistemic purposes are the basis for any academic writing. In order to equip educational functionaries in grasping the epistemic purpose, this theme is included in this training package. Whatever the clarity that educational functionaries do posses in formulating the contours of epistemic purposes of their academic activity, unless they are able to report it in a viable format, it would be futile to yield conscious improvement in quality of education. Educational functionaries are requiring to be acquainted with the characteristics of a good academic writing to make sense of their academic work to polity implications. In this training programme, educational functionaries were acquainted with the characteristics of good academic writing.

One of the pertinent inadequacies that educational functionaries encounter during the process of reporting their academic work is to understand and interpret the data. They do have huge and variety of data. This data would definitely provide innovative insights and ideas in improving the schooling system. But due to certain limitations of organizing the data, most of the potential academic activities undertaken in the state education departments are kept in cold storage. If educational functionaries are able to use the data in a proper way, they would visualize the implications of their academic work. Hence, in this programme there are four themes related to management of data, viz., Variations in data and attributing meaning; Qualitative data; Integration of qualitative and quantitative data; and Ideation of data. Before starting to write the report, it is necessary to decide the format of the report depending on the quantum of work undertaken and the nature of data available. Planning the structure of report is the most important pre-requirement of any academic reporting. In order to equip educational functionaries with necessary knowledge and skills of planning their report, different aspects of structuring their report are included in the training programme.

Normally structure of any academic/research report constitute abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions. In this training programme all these aspects are dealt under six themes, viz., Precise lay out (abstract), Initial statements, assumptions and purposes (introduction), Modus operandi (methodology), The outcome (results), Argumentation (discussion), and Exact contribution to knowledge (conclusions). The themes included in this training programme pertaining to documentation are Documentation & types of Documents; and Guidelines for documentation. In these days efforts are on to prepare teachers as researchers. As a result of this many action researches and case studies are being conducted. The purpose of this training is also to prepare educational functionaries in reporting action researches and hence one theme on action research and case studies is included. Most of the research/academic activities in the states are time bound and educational functionaries are required to complete the task within a stipulated time. As time management is an essential component of academic reporting and documentation, certain guidelines on time management of the reporting are included in this training package.