Lori Olafson – författare

The senior research compliance administrator has emerged as a critically important position as universities and other research organizations face an increasingly intricate regulatory environment. These administrators are tasked with a special challenge: ensuring that their institutions conduct safe, ethical, and compliant research while also helping researchers understand and meet compliance requirements and achieve their research goals. These competing responsibilities can make the role of the research administrator complex; however, those who serve in this role may find that they have limited preparation for the challenges and little or no formal education in the field.

Thus, the goal of this handbook is to provide practical guidance to research administrators who are responsible for a wide variety of compliance programs. Previous volumes on these topics have focused primarily on educating research faculty, staff, and students. An assumption in many of these handbooks is that all additional questions related to research ethics and regulations should be directed to the senior research administrator; yet, the books have limited guidance intended for the senior research administrators themselves. This handbook is designed, therefore, to serve as a detailed program implementation manual for these administrators, who are expected to be conversant on a broad range of complex ethical and regulatory topics and to provide guidance to those conducting research, as well as upper administration and others interested in safe, ethical, and compliant research.

The focus of this book is to explore teachers’ evolving personal epistemologies, or the beliefs we hold about the origin and development of knowledge in the context of teaching. The chapters focus on a range of conceptual frameworks about how university and field-based experiences influence the connections between teachers’ personal epistemologies and teaching practice. In an earlier volume we investigated preservice and inservice teachers’ beliefs and teaching practices (Brownlee, Schraw and Berthelsen, 2011). While we addressed the nature of teachers’ personal epistemologies, learning and teaching practices, and approaches for changing beliefs throughout teacher education programs, the volume did not address conceptual frameworks for the development of teacher’s personal epistemologies. To address this gap, the book is focused on teacher educators, teachers and teacher education programmers in universities with an overall aim of highlighting how we might support preservice teachers’ involvement in learning that is challenging and inservice teachers’ engagement in professional experiences that promote changes in teaching practice. We argue that teachers need to be encouraged to question their beliefs and develop increasingly sophisticated beliefs about their knowledge and their students’ knowledge that facilitate learning and intellectual growth.