We’d like you to help us with the British Academic Written English Secondary School (BAWESS) corpus project. Please read this information sheet carefully and ask us if you have any questions about any details of the project, or what taking part would mean for you.
Take your time to decide if you’d like to take part. It’s up to you if you want to do this. If you don’t, that’s absolutely fine.
If you want to participate, you’ll be asked to sign a consent form (which you will receive via email).
1) What is the purpose of the project?
We aim to collect a sample of written texts from exam classrooms (iGCSE/GCSE, A Level and IB). These texts will form the British Academic Written English Secondary School (BAWESS) Corpus (a digitally accessible collection of texts), which will help us understand the writing demands and the language used in specific subject areas and develop a learning resource for teachers and students.
2) Why have I been selected to take part?
As a teacher teaching students in their exam years, we’d like your help to collect your students’ written texts. All students who are studying for from iGCSE, GCSE, A Level and IB exams will be asked if they’d like to participate.
3) Do my students have to take part?
Participation is completely voluntary. It’s up to you to decide if you’d like your class to participate. If you agree that your class can take part, we’ll ask you, your students’ Parent/Guardian and your students to sign a Consent Form. If you provide consent, your class will then be given information about the BAWESS project. Should your class wish to take part, they’ll be asked to sign Young Person’s Assent Form.
4) What will I and my students be asked to do?
We’re not asking students to do any extra work. We’re asking you to collect the writing tasks that you are currently doing in your class together with some contextual information (e.g. exam type, task type, subject, exam board, awarded grade). Information that should be attached to the texts is in the BAWESS Data Collection Metadata file. What we’ll ask you to do is: copy the students’ independently written work related to examination preparation or questions; remove the students’ name and assign a case number to each student; keep a record of case numbers as they related to each student in order to be able to reassign the same number to each student; and transfer the copied written texts to the research folder which we’ll provide a link to. We’ll ask you to keep the collected data in a safe manner on your school hard drive that will be encrypted up until the point of submission to the research team. We’ll make the texts digital and develop a corpus which will part of an online resource for researchers, teachers and students.
5) How much time will I be expected to dedicate to the project?
As you’re collecting and marking written tasks that you’re currently doing in your class, the collection of texts is something that will be part of your daily activity. The anonymisation of the texts by removing the students’ name and assigning their work a case number, sharing via scanning or uploading of the student’s texts should take approximately 20-30 minutes per class in the first instance. This process will be reduced as you become more familiar with the task.
6) What support will be available?
We will provide you with clear guidelines to help make the data collection smoother. In addition, we’ll do all we can to support you in collecting, anonymising and sharing the student texts accompanied with contextual information (e.g. exam type, task type, subject, exam board, awarded grade). We appreciate any contribution, so please assist with this step as much or as little as is practical for you. We are very conscious of the demands of your job and all of the research team will be available to go to your school to provide support with this task or do it ourselves, if required.
7) What are the exclusion criteria?
The work must be written in English in preparation for iGCSE, GCSE, A Level or IB. The student must be over the age of 14 years old and must have the capacity to personally agree to voluntarily participate in the study.
8) What are the benefits of taking part?
When the corpus is ready, we’ll offer sessions in schools for teachers and students that demonstrate how a corpus tool can inform improvements in examination writing (e.g., it could provide key vocabulary and language structures commonly used in different subject areas).
9) What are the possible disadvantages and risks of taking part?
There are no obvious disadvantages to your class taking part in the project. If any of your students choose not to participate and don’t want to share their written work, that’s fine.
10) Will my students’ participation involve any discomfort or embarrassment?
Your students shouldn’t feel any discomfort or embarrassment when taking part in the project. If, however, they do feel uncomfortable or appear upset at any time, encourage them to speak to you, or a member of the research team and we’ll remove their data from the study.
11) Who will have access to the information that my students provide?
Only the research team will have access to the information that your students provide. This includes access to your students’ anonymised texts complemented by contextual information (such as region, school type, exam type, task type, subject, exam board, awarded mark). The data held by the research team will be completely anonymous and treated as confidential. We’ll keep any record we have of your child taking part in the project (such as your consent forms) securely for 10 years. After 10 years they will be disposed of in a secure manner.
12) What will happen to the data collected and results of the project?
All data collected will be treated as confidential and kept in a locked cabinet at the University of Bath, or on a password protected file on the University of Bath’s secure server (X drive). This data will be stored following the current UK data protection legislation. We will send you a summary of the project results when it’s finished. We’ll develop an online learning resource for teachers and students. Your students’ names or other identifying information won’t be disclosed in this online resource or any presentation or publication from the research. Once the project is completed, other teachers, learners and researchers may access the BAWESS corpus which will be publicly available online and will contain your students’ anonymised texts complemented by contextual information (such as region, school type, exam type, task type, subject, exam board, awarded mark). Any additional use of your students’ data will only occur with their consent and the University of Bath’s approval, data will continue to be stored in accordance with GDPR.
13) How can I withdraw from the project?
If you wish to withdraw from the project, please inform one of the researchers or the contact person at your school at the earliest opportunity. You can withdraw from the project without providing reasons for doing so and without consequence. If you withdraw after data collection but prior to the submission of the data to the research team, we will ask you to appoint an alternative staff member to assist with the data anonymisation in your place. If such a staff member cannot be found, we will withdraw your cohort from the study. If you wish to withdraw after the submission of the anonymised data to the research team, if your students are aged 16+ and had previously consented to participation in the study, they will continue to be involved in the study unless they withdraw before their anonymised data has been given to the research team. If your students are under the age of 16 and their guardian/parent had previously consented to participation in the study, they will continue to be involved unless the student or their guardian/parent withdraws before their anonymised data has been given to the research team. This will typically be two weeks after the students’ written texts have been collected. After the anonymised data has been given to the research team, the research team won’t be able to identify your students’ texts anymore and won’t be able to withdraw any data from the study.
14) How can I withdraw learners from the project?
If you wish to withdraw any of your students from the project, please inform one of the researchers or the contact person at your school at your earliest opportunity. You can withdraw your students from the project at any point without providing reasons for doing so and without consequence, until the anonymised data has been received by the BAWESS research team. After the anonymised data has been obtained by the research team, the research team won’t be able to identify your students’ texts anymore and won’t be able to withdraw any data from the study. We’ll ask you to keep an anonymisation key (linking a number to each unique student) so that subsequent texts can be identified as having been produced by a particular student. As you hold this anonymisation key, any student can withdraw their data up until the point that this key is disposed of in a safe manner. We’ll ask you to dispose of this anonymisation key once we have obtained the anonymised students’ texts, after which we will not be able to identify or withdraw any data.
15) Who has reviewed the project?
This project has been given a favourable opinion by the University of Bath, Social Science Research Ethics Committee (SSREC) [reference: 1112-11759].
16) University of Bath privacy notice
The University of Bath privacy notice can be found here.
17) What happens if there is a problem?
If you have a concern about any aspect of the project, you should ask to speak to the main researcher, Gail Forey, at the University of Bath (email: g.forey@bath.ac.uk; telephone: +44 (0)7853144556), who will do her best to answer any questions.
If Gail is unable to resolve your concern or you wish to make a complaint regarding the project, please contact the Research Governance and Compliance Team at research-ethics@bath.ac.uk
18) If I require further information, who should I contact and how?
You can contact Professor Gail Forey, who will be happy to answer any questions that you have. Please do also talk to your students about taking part (or not) in the project.
Principal Investigator: Professor Gail Forey, Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of Education, University of Bath, BA7 2AY, UK. Email: g.forey@bath.ac.uk; telephone: +44 (0)7853144556
Thank you, your students, and their parents for taking the time to support this project!