When you hear the term “social media influencer”, education research isn’t usually the next thing that springs to mind. But, if you take an interest in the online education world you’ll recognise that, just as there are YouTube influencers who have built huge followings through playing computer games or taking things out of boxes, there is an influencer niche for teachers who can rack up the retweets with a pithy push of the latest academic paper on cognitive load theory, or the link between social background and key stage 4 outcomes.

The rise of the education research influencer has been credited as one of the driving forces behind the recent push for research-informed practice in schools. However, there are implications here that are still largely unexplored.

What does the increasing reach of the social media influencer mean for the way teachers engage with educational research and try to put it into action in the classroom? Which kinds of research are most likely to get promoted, and which are more likely to fail to gain traction?

That’s one element of the Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education (REMPLE) study, led by Sheffield Hallam University with a £376,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, that aims to “understand how literacy research evidence moves to and between primary teachers and what happens to it as it does so”.

A range of factors appear to be adding up to “a changing context for the movement of research” in education, says former primary teacher Cathy Burnett, now a professor of literacy and education at the university’s Sheffield Institute of Education and lead investigator on the project.

There’s the “huge range of organisations who broker research” including, but not limited to, universities, consultancies, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and subject associations for teachers. And there’s also what Burnett calls a “complex communicative environment”: with social media, we see “people gathering followings and because of that, certain kinds of ideas and certain kinds of research gaining attention”.

What exactly defines someone as a social media influencer in the context of educational research? That is “one of the things we’re interested in finding out”, says Burnett.

“The significance of social media isn’t just about high-profile individuals gathering followings on Twitter; it’s also about teachers connecting with one another in informal communities,” she explains. “And that means research is moving between teachers in different schools in different organisations across the country and internationally - or has the potential to do so.

“There’s also the role of algorithms as well, meaning that teachers will come across the kinds of things they have searched for before.”

It’s all a far cry from the traditional world of teachers being taught about research through CPD, observes Julia Gillen, professor of literacy studies at Lancaster University and another researcher involved with the project. “Now there’s such a wide range of ways in which teachers access research,” she says.

What the REMPLE study will explore

There are three parts to the study. The first involves the researchers - who also include Gill Adams of Sheffield Hallam University and Terrie Lynn Thompson of the University of Stirling - talking to primary teachers, asking them about their experiences engaging with literacy research, how they are coming across it, and their perspectives on it.

The second involves tracing particular pieces of research online, Burnett says.

“We’re going to take a few examples of literacy research and see what happened to them, looking at them across social media sites, looking at them across more conventional academic sites, and seeing both how research moves but also whether there are any shifts in meaning as it moves,” she explains.

“As research appears on different sites, do the emphases shift? Do the nuances remain? Do the caveats that researchers always build into their methodologies stay, or do they slip away as well?”

The third part of the study will include “looking at media discourses about primary literacy and finding out what’s there” in terms of patterns of keywords, says Gillen. “If one imagines that media discourse might be, to some degree, some kind of proxy for public discourse, what are the issues that are prominent - for example, in everyday newspaper discourse, what kind of influence are [these issues] having on teachers’ perceptions of research? Are they the same things that are in policy documents, or are they different, and to what degree?”

The study focuses on the particular area of primary teachers accessing literacy research - but it taps into that bigger transformation. Changes to the way teachers access educational research could bring pros - for example, social media opening a whole new world of research to all teachers, not just the senior leaders who might get sent on a course - as well as cons.

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A recent EEF evidence review on cognitive science approaches in the classroom warned of the risk of “lethal mutations” emerging, where “a practice becomes disconnected from the theory”. The review cited the example of dual coding - where theory holds that working memory has two distinct components and visual aids might boost retention of information, but where teachers reported concerns that the research had “become misunderstood and reduced to ‘pretty icons’ and complex graphic organisers”, with “irrelevant illustrations” added to presentations that could be a distraction for pupils.

It’s arguable that the risk of such “lethal mutations” is increased by the freer, more informal - and perhaps sometimes ideologically partisan - distribution of research through social media.

Social media “presents teachers with a great opportunity to share ideas, inform practice and sustain professional communities beyond their immediate contexts,” says Tom Perry, assistant professor in education studies at the University of Warwick and lead author of the EEF evidence review.

“However, the quality of education research and the commentary on it is highly variable. With limited time and research methods training, and researchers’ tendency to over-claim about the strength and significance of their findings, research on social media can be difficult for teachers to navigate.”

Perry adds that while there is plenty of high-quality education research out there, engaging with it is “unlikely to be beneficial without being part of high-quality and sustained professional development and learning” as “even well-communicated research frequently gets over-simplified, lost in translation, and fails to make the journey across subjects and school contexts”.

There is also the issue that education research, and how teachers share it on social media, can sometimes reflect the familiar partisan divide between “progressives” and “traditionalists”.

We’ve all probably been tempted to seize a piece of research that seems to offer firm evidence for our own beliefs and say, “Aha - this proves I’m right”. But academic research in any field is rarely about any single piece of research, experts argue - instead, it is about a steady process of accumulation, or rebuttal, of evidence over years, through large numbers of studies.

Transmission of research via social media might simplify, or over-simplify, that process - but we currently don’t know exactly how this plays out in the context of education.

The Sheffield Hallam-led study - which is looking for primary teachers to join it - hopes to shed some light on this question, along with others. It aims to generate “materials, events and resources…that will support engagement with a wide variety of literacy research” for teachers, says Burnett.

In general, Perry thinks more research on how teachers engage with research is needed - especially as education’s evidence-informed revolution shows no signs of slowing down.

“It would be interesting to know more about what research is and is not visible, thinking about both research quality and its communication, and the role of underlying commercial and political interests,” he says of this somewhat meta proposition.

What influences, conscious or unconscious, are the influencers influenced by? As social media changes the way we look at education research and opens new opportunities, perhaps it’s time also to think more critically about what is going on here.