Introduction and summaryA more active interest is being shown by teachers in further education in the techniques of educational investigations and research. A register of current work in the North Western Region has been compiled at Bolton College of Education (Technical). The Educational Research Advisory Committee of the North Western Regional Advisory Council for Further Education asked Bolton Training College (as this College was known until recently) to arrange a series of short courses, each to be devoted to a study of the theory and practice of a particular research technique.The first of these courses in 1963, lasting two days a month apart, was devoted to the design and use of questionnaires, with emphasis on the practical application of the theory. Overall the course members prepared together agreed questionnaires, used them in their own colleges, analysed the results by standard statistical methods and discussed the value of the information gained thereby. The content of the second day of the course was left open, to be dependent on the progress of the first day's work and the intervening practical work which followed. Although experimental design was dealt with on the first day it became very clear that an extensive practical course on experimental design should be given very early in this series of courses. The questionnaire results appeared to show (among other things) that many G1 students in F.E. thought science difficult although they considered mathematics easy. A consideration of the course itself indicated that co-operative research and team investigations could be uniquely valuable in educational research in further education.A second 'open ended' course was planned to exercise its course members in research planning and techniques by means of a simulated research project, using real problems in a real life situation. Real research always involves a great deal of routine repetitive work in order to have acceptable validity. It was not intended to carry such a burden of work in this course, but only sufficient of it to establish the procedures. Hence significant results were not anticipated but within the limitations of time the results were to be as good as possible.The course was to be a study of aspects of the content and teaching of subjects in the General Course (Engineering), to take five full days, spread over a full year from April 1964 to March 1965. In the event the investigations are likely to continue until August 1965 by request of members involved, though the course itself has now virtually dosed apart from one further meeting it is hoped to hold in 1965 when the G1 results are published.
