Welcome to the web archive of educational evaluations developed by members of the Cambridge Conference as part of the ESRC QUADS (Qualitative Archive and Data Sharing) Programme. The archive contains documents related to important educational evaluations undertaken over the past three decades by members of the Cambridge Conference on Evaluation, which was first convened in 1972. It also contains transcripts of interviews with members of the Cambridge Conference about the policy, educational and methodological contexts of their work, video excerpts from these interviews, and a select bibliography of related published work.
The digital archive has been further developed under the auspices of the ESRC/EPSRC Ensemble Project (http://www.ensemble.ac.uk). This three year project has been exploring the potential of emerging 'semantic web' technologies to support teaching, learning and research in areas where some kind of 'case based' learning is used. Semantic web technologies extend existing web resources and databased by linking them - either directly, or using machine based inferencing. This allows the archive to be explored and new associations and patterns identified.
This web archive presents the educational evaluations using some of these semantic web tools, so it is possible to search the entire archive, or browse the collections, read interviews with the original evaluators and view interactive video clips associated with the projects.. Alternative approaches are to view the archive contents on a Timeline or to begin your search from the specialised vocabulary developed by the archive project.
The semantic web tools we use 'preload' a lot of data, so some of these pages take a few seconds to load, but then allow you to explore rapidly. There is more information about how these web tools work in the technical briefings listed below.
Explore the Archive
Search the Entire Archive
Search the archive by project, key terms and document types, sort and filter on different parameters. Short descriptions accompany each archive research.
Browse Collections
Review the collections in the archive, read interviews with the original evaluators and view selected video excerpts and associated resources in the archive
People Represented in the Archive
A list of the the main contributors to the archive and others whose work is represented in the collections.
Publications Related to Archive Content
A select bibliography of articles, reports and other publications related to the collections in the archive and to the work of the Cambridge Conference on Evaluation more generally.
Briefings and Further Information
- Project Briefing 1: An Archive of Educational Evaluations (2005, revised 2011)
- Project Briefing 2: The Dimensions of Case Study in Educational Evaluation (2006, revised 2011) - In preparation
- Project Briefing 3: Descriptive Metadata for Archives of Case Studies (2006, revised 2011)
- Project Overview 1: 'Bread and Dreams' - The Evaluation and the Archive (2011)
- Project Overview 2: 'The Buddy Evaluation' - The Evaluation and the Archive (2011)
- Project Overview 3: 'CAP: The Cambridge Accountability Project' - The Evaluation and the Archive (2011)
- Project Report: The QUADS Educational Evaluations Report to ESRC, the funders of the project. This reports on the archive prior to the subsequent work carried out under the 'Ensemble' project.
Contact, Questions and Contributions
For further information about the archive, or if the FAQ does not resolve any problems you may have, contact: Prof. Patrick Carmichael, Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, L17 6BD.
We are also interested in adding further collections to the archive, and in developing new ways of using its contents; please get in touch if you would like to discuss how to contribute or develop new applications of the archive.