tesifyUK
Start free
How it worksFAQBlogHelpContactLog in

Tag: education

  • How to Write the Methodology Chapter of an Education Dissertation (UK, 2026)

    How to Write the Methodology Chapter of an Education Dissertation (UK, 2026)

    The methodology chapter of an education dissertation has to do one thing the business or psychology version does not: explain how you got into a school, a nursery or a college and out again without harming anyone, and then show that the data you collected there can bear the weight of your conclusions. Write it as a sequence of decisions, each one justified against the alternative you rejected, and put access, consent and safeguarding at the centre rather than in a paragraph at the end.

    This guide is for UK undergraduate and taught-master’s students on Education Studies, BEd, PGCE, Childhood Studies and MA Education programmes. Each step states the output you should have on the page before moving on.

    Step 1: Read your handbook and fix the word budget before you write anything

    Education departments vary more than most in what they call this chapter. Some want a full “Methodology” with a paradigm discussion; others want “Research Design and Methods” and treat philosophy as padding; PGCE and practitioner-enquiry routes often want an “Approach to the Enquiry” section built around your own classroom. The handbook overrides everything below, including the structure at the end of this guide.

    Fix the length now. Most UK education dissertations run to 8,000–12,000 words, and the methodology typically carries 15–20% of that: roughly 1,500–2,000 words on a 10,000-word project. The verified range of undergraduate limits by subject is set out in our data on dissertation word counts at UK universities.

    Output of this step: the chapter title your department uses, the word budget, and the list of section headings your handbook expects, copied into your draft as placeholders.

    Grad Coach walks through the four moves of a methodology chapter; the education-specific steps below sit on top of them.

    Step 2: State your position in one paragraph, and make it do work

    Education research is unusually explicit about paradigms, and markers in the field expect to see one. The standard text on UK courses is Cohen, Manion and Morrison’s Research Methods in Education, now in its eighth edition (Routledge, 2018), which added dedicated chapters on the role of theory in educational research and on research questions and hypotheses.

    • Interpretivist: you are interested in how teachers, pupils or parents make sense of something. Most small-scale education dissertations sit here, and it points you towards interviews, observation and documents.
    • Post-positivist: you are testing whether an intervention or a characteristic is associated with a measurable outcome. It points you towards questionnaires, attainment data or a small pre/post design.
    • Pragmatist: the question decides the method. This is the honest position behind most mixed-methods projects, and it is acceptable to say so.

    The failure mode is two pages of definitions with no consequence. The fix is one sentence of consequence per position: “Because this study is concerned with how newly qualified teachers describe the experience of managing behaviour, rather than with measuring behaviour incidents, an interpretivist position was adopted, which in turn made semi-structured interviews more appropriate than a questionnaire.”

    Output of this step: one paragraph naming the position, citing one methods text, and ending with the design decision the position leads to.

    Step 3: Choose a design the field actually uses

    Four designs cover almost every UK education dissertation, and each has a known weakness you should concede in the same paragraph in which you claim its strengths.

    1. Case study of one setting. One school, one department, one early-years class. Strong for “how” and “why” questions; weak for generalisation, which you must say plainly.
    2. Practitioner enquiry or action research. The trainee or teacher researches their own practice through a plan–act–observe–reflect cycle. Powerful and very common on PGCE and BEd routes, but it raises the insider-researcher issues in Step 8 and needs the same consent as any other design, even though the participants are “your” pupils.
    3. Small-scale interview study. Six to twelve teachers, teaching assistants or parents. The most feasible design for a student with no school placement, and one whose sample size you can defend with the information-power argument set out in our guide to sample size for an undergraduate dissertation.
    4. Documentary or secondary-data analysis. Published school policies, Ofsted inspection reports, curriculum documents, or attainment and absence statistics from the Department for Education’s Explore Education Statistics service. No participants, minimal ethics, and often the strongest option when school access is uncertain. The access tiers for the main datasets are set out in our guide to UK data sources by subject.

    Name the design in one sentence. “Questionnaires were given to teachers” is not a design; “a single-site case study design was used, with a Year 5 class in one primary school as the bounded case” is.

    Output of this step: a named design, a one-sentence boundary statement, and one conceded weakness.

    Step 4: Secure access through the gatekeeper, in the right order

    This is the step that distinguishes an education methodology from every other discipline’s, and it is where students lose weeks. You cannot walk into a school and recruit. You go through a gatekeeper, and UK universities are precise about what that means. The University of Sussex’s research ethics guidance defines a gatekeeper as “any person or institution that acts as an intermediary between a researcher and potential participants”, and states that the headteacher’s formal acceptance that research may take place in a school “can only occur after” the faculty ethics committee has granted approval.

    The order, then, is fixed: informal approach to the school to establish willingness in principle, ethics application, approval, and only then the formal gatekeeper letter and recruitment. The general triggers, tiers and timelines are covered in our guide to ethics approval for an undergraduate dissertation; the education-specific points are these:

    • The gatekeeper letter is evidence, not a courtesy. Keep the headteacher’s signed permission and put it in an appendix.
    • DBS clearance depends on contact. Sussex states that if you will be alone with a child in a separate room, “you will need a DBS check before you may begin data collection”. Research conducted alongside teachers in a supervised classroom may not require one, but the school decides, and a check can take weeks. Ask at the informal-approach stage, not after approval.
    • Your placement school is a gatekeeper too. Being a trainee in the building does not replace the headteacher’s written permission to research in it.

    Output of this step: a paragraph describing the access route with dates, and an appendix reference to the signed gatekeeper permission.

    A signed headteacher permission letter and a DBS certificate laid on a school office desk
    Access is evidence: the signed gatekeeper letter belongs in an appendix, and the DBS question is asked before ethics approval, not after.

    Step 5: Consent, assent and the under-16 rule

    Education research nearly always involves people who cannot give legal consent for themselves, and your chapter must show you understood the distinction. UK institutional guidance is consistent on the core rule: for participants under 16, informed consent must also be obtained from those with parental responsibility, and the default is opt-in, meaning a returned, signed form, rather than opt-out. Sussex adds that for 16- to 18-year-olds the review must consider “whether the young people involved can be expected to have sufficient understanding”, so a sixth-form project is not automatically exempt from parental consent.

    Consent from the adult is not the end of it. The child’s own agreement, usually called assent, is expected as good practice, obtained in a form suited to age: a simple illustrated sheet for infants, a short conversation with a clear right to stop for older pupils.

    The British Educational Research Association’s Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research reached its fifth edition in 2024, published for BERA’s fiftieth anniversary. The revised edition acknowledges the Equality Act 2010, asks researchers to “guard against inadvertently compounding marginalisation”, and emphasises researchers’ responsibilities “not only to protect participants but also to promote their rights to participation, particularly marginalised and vulnerable groups”. Cite the current edition; a 2018 fourth-edition citation now dates the chapter.

    Output of this step: a consent paragraph naming who consented, who assented, how withdrawal worked, and a BERA (2024) citation; the information sheets and forms go in appendices.

    Step 6: Choose instruments that work with your participants

    Describe exactly what you used, where it came from and why it suited the people you were researching.

    1. Semi-structured interviews with adults. State the schedule’s origin (derived from which literature), duration, recording method and transcription approach. Put the schedule in an appendix.
    2. Pupil-appropriate methods. Draw-and-write tasks, sorting activities, short focus groups with a familiar adult present. Justify the method by age, not by convenience, and say what you did to reduce the pressure a child feels to give the “right” answer to an adult.
    3. Observation schedules. Structured or unstructured, how long, how recorded, and whether the pupils and teacher knew what was being observed.
    4. Questionnaires for staff. If you adapted a published instrument, cite it and say what you changed; if you wrote your own, explain how items were derived from the literature and whether you piloted them.

    Output of this step: one paragraph per instrument, each ending with an appendix reference.

    Step 7: State the analysis before the findings chapter, not inside it

    Nothing in your findings should arrive as a surprise. For interview and observation data the usual approach on UK education programmes is reflexive thematic analysis, and the coding procedure should be described concretely: how codes were generated, whether a supervisor or peer looked at a sample, how themes were built. The full sequence is in our guide to the six phases of thematic analysis. For small questionnaire samples, descriptive statistics and simple comparisons are usually the honest limit; say so rather than reaching for tests your sample cannot support.

    Output of this step: a named analytic approach, a description of the coding or calculation procedure, and the software used.

    Printed interview transcripts being coded by hand with coloured pens on a desk
    Describe the coding procedure as something a reader could repeat, not as themes that emerged.

    Step 8: Write the positionality paragraph every education marker looks for

    If you researched your own placement school, your own class or colleagues you work with, you are an insider researcher, and the field expects you to say what that did to the data. Pupils may have answered you as their teacher rather than as a researcher; colleagues may have told you what they thought you wanted to hear; you may have interpreted a familiar setting through assumptions you no longer notice. A positionality paragraph names these, states what you did about them (a reflexive journal, a familiar adult present, anonymised transcripts) and does not apologise for the design.

    Output of this step: one paragraph, first person if your handbook permits it, naming your relationship to the setting and its consequences.

    Step 9: Trustworthiness and limitations, beside the methods that caused them

    For qualitative designs, use the trustworthiness vocabulary (credibility, transferability, dependability, confirmability) and give one concrete action under each. For quantitative designs, address reliability and validity of the instrument separately. Then list the methodological limitations here as well as in your conclusion: a single site, a convenience sample of willing staff, a term-long window, the absence of pupil voice if you only spoke to adults.

    Step 10: Reference the methods literature correctly

    Education programmes overwhelmingly use Harvard, most often the Cite Them Right version, and your methodology is the chapter with the densest referencing of sources. Two worked examples, formatted for a reference list:

    British Educational Research Association (2024) Ethical guidelines for educational research. 5th edn. London: BERA. Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-fifth-edition-2024 (Accessed: 30 August 2026).

    Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. (2018) Research methods in education. 8th edn. Abingdon: Routledge.

    In-text: (BERA, 2024) and (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2018). If your bibliography never quite matches the handbook, Tesify’s automatic bibliography formats Harvard, APA and OSCOLA references from a DOI, ISBN or URL and keeps the list alphabetised as the chapter grows.

    A structure you can lift

    1. Introduction: restate the research questions and preview the chapter
    2. Research position and approach
    3. Research design and the bounded case or setting
    4. Access, gatekeepers and safeguarding
    5. Participants, sampling and recruitment
    6. Consent and assent
    7. Data collection instruments and procedure
    8. Data analysis
    9. Positionality and the insider researcher
    10. Trustworthiness, ethics and limitations
    11. Summary

    Business and management students will notice this order is close to the one in our guide to the methodology chapter of a business dissertation. The difference is sections 4, 6 and 9, which carry the marks in education and barely exist elsewhere.

    If the structure is clear and the drafting has stalled

    Tesify can build your education methodology chapter section by section from your own design decisions, your own access story and your own consent procedure, so the reasoning and the data stay yours and the prose stops being the bottleneck. The chapter is 100% written by you; what you get is structure and momentum.

    Frequently asked questions

    Do I need a DBS check to do dissertation research in a school?

    It depends on contact. If you will be alone with a child, UK university guidance says you need a DBS check before data collection begins. Research conducted in a classroom alongside the teacher may not require one, but the school decides, so ask at the informal-approach stage because a check can take weeks.

    Can I research my own placement class?

    Usually yes, and practitioner enquiry is a recognised design on PGCE and BEd routes. You still need the headteacher’s written permission, parental opt-in consent for pupils under 16, and a positionality paragraph explaining how being their teacher shaped what they told you.

    Is opt-out parental consent acceptable for an undergraduate project?

    Treat opt-in as the default for children under 16. Most UK ethics committees require a returned, signed form for student projects, and an opt-out design needs a specific justification that is rarely accepted at undergraduate level.

    Which edition of the BERA guidelines should I cite?

    The fifth edition, published in 2024. It replaced the 2018 fourth edition, and citing the older one signals that the chapter was written from an out-of-date reading list.

    How many teachers should I interview?

    Six to twelve is typical for a small-scale undergraduate study, and the justification matters more than the number: explain why that many was enough to answer your question.

    Can I use Ofsted reports or DfE statistics instead of collecting my own data?

    Yes, and documentary or secondary-data designs are often the strongest option when school access is uncertain. Name the source, the date range, the sampling of documents and the framework you used to analyse them, and state that no participants were involved.

    Should the methodology chapter be written in the past tense?

    Yes, once the research is done. You are reporting what was carried out. The positionality paragraph is normally in the first person if your handbook allows it; check before you commit.

    What is the most common reason education methodology chapters lose marks?

    Describing rather than justifying. “Interviews were conducted” earns less than a sentence that says why interviews, why those participants, why that number, and what was lost by not choosing the alternative.

  • Which Theoretical Framework Should Your Education Dissertation Use? Eight Compared (2026)

    Which Theoretical Framework Should Your Education Dissertation Use? Eight Compared (2026)

    For most UK undergraduate and master’s education dissertations the right theoretical framework is one of eight, and the choice is decided by your research question, not by which theorist you liked most in year two. The table below sets them side by side on the only criteria that matter at this level: what the theory explains, what data it needs, how much reading it demands, and where a marker will catch you using it badly. A ranked shortlist and a single recommendation follow.

    Framework Key text Explains Data it wants Reading load Where students get caught
    Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky) Vygotsky (1978) Mind in Society How learning happens through interaction and more capable others Classroom observation, talk, peer and adult support Low Using “scaffolding” as if Vygotsky coined it (Wood, Bruner and Ross did, in 1976)
    Cultural capital, habitus and field (Bourdieu) Bourdieu (1986) “The forms of capital” Why class advantage reproduces through schooling Interviews, life histories, policy and admissions documents High Treating capital as a quantity, dropping habitus and field
    Self-efficacy (Bandura) Bandura (1977, Psychological Review) Why belief in one’s capability predicts effort and persistence Validated scales, pre/post measures Low Measuring confidence with a home-made scale
    Bioecological systems (Bronfenbrenner) Bronfenbrenner (1979); Bronfenbrenner and Morris (2006) How a child’s development sits inside nested contexts Multi-source data: child, family, school, policy Medium Citing the 1979 concentric-circles model and calling it the current theory
    Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) Ryan and Deci (2000, American Psychologist) Motivation through autonomy, competence and relatedness Questionnaires, interviews about choice and pressure Low Reducing it to “intrinsic good, extrinsic bad”
    Communities of practice (Lave and Wenger) Lave and Wenger (1991) Situated Learning How newcomers learn by participating in a practice Placement, mentoring and induction data Medium Using it for a classroom of pupils rather than a professional community
    Growth mindset (Dweck) Dweck (2006) Mindset; Sisk et al. (2018) Whether beliefs about intelligence affect achievement Mindset scales, attainment Low Ignoring the 2018 meta-analyses that found weak effects
    Purposes of education (Biesta) Biesta (2009) What schooling is for: qualification, socialisation, subjectification Policy documents, curricula, teacher interviews Medium Using it to describe rather than to evaluate

    What a theoretical framework is being asked to do

    Sheffield Hallam University’s research-project guidance describes the theoretical framework as your “toolbox”: “a set of theories, concepts, ideas and hypotheses that you will use to build a solution to the research problem or gap you have identified.” If a theory appears in your framework and never reappears in your findings or discussion, it was decoration, and markers at every UK education department will say so in the feedback.

    The practical test before you commit to any row of the table: write your research question, then write one sentence beginning “This framework lets me see…”. If you cannot finish the sentence with something specific to your data, move down the list. The mechanics of turning a framework into a defensible design are set out in our guide to writing the methodology chapter of an education dissertation; this article is about which lens to pick.

    Degree Doctor on the difference between a theoretical and a conceptual framework, with worked examples.

    The ranked shortlist

    1. Sociocultural theory: the best default for a classroom study

    If your data are classroom talk, peer collaboration, adult support or the way a task is set up, Vygotsky’s account of learning as first social and then internal, with the zone of proximal development as the space between what a learner can do alone and with help, will carry a whole undergraduate project.

    Who it suits: primary and early-years projects, studies of group work, teaching-assistant support, and any dissertation with observation at its centre.

    Where it falls short: it says little about why some learners get more help than others, so a project about inequality will find it thin. And be precise with the vocabulary: “scaffolding” was introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross in 1976, building on Vygotsky, and attributing it to Vygotsky himself is one of the most common errors in education reference lists.

    2. Bourdieu: the strongest lens for inequality, and the hardest to use well

    Cultural capital, habitus and field are the framework UK education research reaches for on class, access and attainment gaps, and Diane Reay’s work on habitus in British schooling shows the concepts applied to exactly the settings undergraduates study. Bourdieu explains why schooling rewards dispositions some families already have, which makes it powerful for interview and life-history data and for reading admissions or curriculum policy.

    Who it suits: sociology-of-education projects, widening participation, parental engagement, first-generation students.

    Where it falls short: reading load. The three concepts only work together, and a dissertation that uses “cultural capital” as a stand-alone tally of museum visits and books at home, with no habitus and no field, has borrowed a word rather than a theory.

    3. Self-efficacy: the cleanest quantitative framework available

    Bandura’s 1977 account of self-efficacy, the belief in one’s capability to organise and execute the actions a task requires, has produced validated instruments for almost every education population, including the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale developed by Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy in 2001. If your design is a questionnaire, a pre/post intervention or a comparison between groups, this is the framework whose measurement problems have already been solved for you.

    Who it suits: trainee-teacher and NQT studies, pupil confidence in a subject, intervention evaluations.

    Where it falls short: it is a theory about belief, not about outcomes, and students routinely over-claim that raised efficacy means raised attainment. It also tempts home-made scales. If you write your own efficacy items instead of using a published instrument, you inherit the validity problem the framework was supposed to remove; our comparison of which validated scales an undergraduate may actually use covers the licensing side.

    A student comparing two theory textbooks side by side with a research question written on a notepad between them
    The test is the sentence “This framework lets me see…”. If it cannot be finished with something specific to your data, choose another row.

    4. Bronfenbrenner: excellent for context, dangerous if you cite the wrong version

    For a project on a child’s experience across home, school and policy, the bioecological model gives you a vocabulary for nested influence that nothing else matches. The trap is which version you cite. The 1979 book gave the familiar concentric circles; by the 2006 chapter with Morris the theory had become the process–person–context–time model, with proximal processes at its centre. Tudge and colleagues reviewed 25 papers published since 2001 that claimed to use the theory and found that all but four relied on outmoded versions, producing what they called conceptual confusion. A marker who knows that paper will check your reference list.

    Who it suits: early childhood, SEND, transitions, studies with data from more than one setting.

    Where it falls short: a single-site interview study cannot populate the outer systems with evidence, and a diagram of circles with your school in the middle is description, not analysis.

    5. Self-determination theory: motivation with a proper evidence base

    Ryan and Deci’s theory of motivation as supported or thwarted by autonomy, competence and relatedness gives a project on engagement, choice or classroom climate three concepts that map directly onto interview questions and onto published scales.

    Who it suits: pupil engagement, homework, reward systems, post-16 course choice.

    Where it falls short: the popular reduction to “intrinsic good, extrinsic bad” misreads the theory, which describes a continuum of regulation. If your discussion chapter uses only two categories, you have not used the framework.

    6. Communities of practice: for placement, mentoring and induction

    Lave and Wenger’s idea that newcomers learn through legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practitioners fits studies of trainee teachers on placement, mentoring, staffroom culture and early-career induction almost perfectly.

    Who it suits: initial teacher education, teaching assistants, professional learning.

    Where it falls short: it was built to explain apprenticeship-style learning among adults, and stretching it over a class of eight-year-olds usually fails. Keep it for professional communities.

    7. Growth mindset: usable, but only with the meta-analyses in the framework

    Dweck’s distinction between fixed and growth beliefs about intelligence is the framework most undergraduates arrive with, because most schools have run some version of it. It can still anchor a good dissertation, provided the framework itself reports the evidence honestly. Sisk and colleagues published two meta-analyses in Psychological Science in 2018, one of 273 studies with more than 365,000 participants on the mindset–achievement relationship and one of 43 intervention studies with more than 57,000 participants, and found weak effects in both. A framework section that presents growth mindset as settled will be marked down; one that sets Dweck against Sisk and asks what a small study can add is a framework doing its job.

    Who it suits: school-based evaluations of an existing mindset initiative, studies of pupil beliefs.

    Where it falls short: a project designed to show that mindset “works” has an answer before it has data.

    8. Biesta: the framework for policy and curriculum dissertations

    Gert Biesta’s account of the three functions of education, qualification, socialisation and subjectification, set out in his 2009 paper on good education in an age of measurement, gives a documentary dissertation a way to evaluate rather than summarise.

    Who it suits: policy analysis, curriculum studies, philosophy-of-education projects with no participants.

    Where it falls short: it is an evaluative framework, so a purely descriptive project will not use it.

    The recommendation

    Choose sociocultural theory if your data are classroom interaction, self-efficacy if your data are numbers, Bourdieu if your question is about inequality and you have the reading time, and Biesta if you are analysing documents. Reach for Bronfenbrenner, self-determination theory, communities of practice or growth mindset only when the question demands them, and in every case cite the primary text and the current version of the theory. If two rows seem to fit, the research question is still too broad: narrow it first with the four moves in our guide to narrowing a dissertation topic, and the framework will usually choose itself.

    A hand-drawn diagram connecting a research question to a single named theory and to the data it needs
    One question, one lens, one kind of data. A framework section that names three theories without connecting them to the data is a reading list.

    How to write the framework section once you have chosen

    1. State the theory in your own words in one paragraph, citing the primary source, and name the two or three concepts you will actually use.
    2. Show it has been used on a question like yours with two or three UK studies, so the marker sees that the choice is conventional in the field rather than personal.
    3. Say what the framework lets you see and what it hides. Every theory has blind spots; naming yours is what distinguishes a framework from a summary.
    4. Connect each concept to a data source or an interview question. This is the sentence that turns theory into method.
    5. Return to it in the discussion. The findings chapter reports; the discussion reads the findings through the lens. If the theory does not reappear, delete it from the framework.

    The section normally runs to 800–1,500 words on a 10,000-word dissertation and sits either at the end of the literature review or as a short chapter of its own; your handbook decides. It is also the section with the highest similarity risk, because theory is paraphrased from the same handful of textbooks by every student in the cohort. Write it from the primary source rather than from a summary, and if you want to check the section before your university runs Turnitin, Tesify’s plagiarism checker shows matched passages sentence by sentence so you can rewrite them with the citation in place.

    Where the framework goes in the dissertation

    Three placements are common in UK education departments and none is wrong: a final section of the literature review, a stand-alone chapter between the review and the methodology, or a short section opening the methodology. What matters is that the theory is introduced before the design decisions that depend on it, and that it matches what you promised in your dissertation proposal.

    When the lens is chosen and the blank framework section is what stands between you and the methodology, Tesify can draft the framework section from your own research question, your chosen theory and your reading list, so the argument stays yours and the section gets written this week rather than the week before submission. The reasoning is 100% written by you; what you get is a structured start.

    Frequently asked questions

    Do I need a theoretical framework for an undergraduate education dissertation?

    Almost always, and most UK education handbooks name it explicitly. Even a small practitioner-enquiry project is expected to say which account of learning or schooling it is working with, because that account shapes what you looked for and how you read what you found.

    Can I use more than one theory?

    You can, but two is the practical limit at this level and you must explain how they fit together. Three named theories in a 10,000-word dissertation is nearly always a reading list rather than a framework.

    What is the difference between a theoretical and a conceptual framework?

    A theoretical framework uses an existing named theory as the lens. A conceptual framework is the map of concepts and relationships you built for your own study, which may draw on one or more theories. Many education departments use the terms loosely, so check which your handbook means.

    Is Bloom’s taxonomy a theoretical framework?

    Not in the sense markers mean. It is a classification of learning objectives, useful for designing tasks or analysing questions, but it does not explain why learning happens. Pair it with a theory if you want to use it.

    Which framework is easiest to apply?

    Sociocultural theory for qualitative classroom data and self-efficacy for quantitative data. Both are short to read, have a clear primary source and come with well-established vocabulary and instruments.

    Should I cite the original theorist or a textbook?

    The original, always, with a textbook or a recent UK study alongside it to show current use.

    Can I still use growth mindset after the 2018 meta-analyses?

    Yes, if the framework section reports them. Sisk and colleagues found weak effects across 273 and 43 studies respectively, and a dissertation that sets that evidence against Dweck’s claims and asks what a small local study can add is a stronger project than one that ignores it.

    Where does the theoretical framework go in an education dissertation?

    At the end of the literature review, as a short chapter of its own, or opening the methodology. All three are accepted in UK education departments; the only rule is that it appears before the design decisions that depend on it.