Government Social Research
Once you have successfully registered with the Institute of Education for the MSc degree you shall have access to the same resources as other registered MSc students at the IOE. This will be indicated in the student handbook for the degree, which will be issued to you following registration.
For this course, students will need a copy of SPSS software in order to complete some assignments. Copies of SPSS software are available for students to purchase from IOE and install on their own PCs for a small charge.
Information Services (IS) at the Institute of Education offers extensive support to Institute staff and students. The IOE librarians and computing staff provide a wide range of services, and advice and training are available on the use of all IOE facilities and resources through face-to-face induction sessions, online self-study materials, a library enquiry desk and a computing help desk.
Find out about current services and resources on the IOE website.
The Institute library has the largest collection in Europe of books and periodicals on educational studies. It contains over 300,000 volumes and has files of nearly 2,000 periodicals from all over the world.
Supplementing these collections are electronic journals, full text electronic books and other documents, and research databases, most of which are available on the internet. Other services include standard borrowing, short loan, reference, enquiry, Interlibrary Loan, postal loan, postal photocopy delivery and self-service photocopying. IOE expert staff provide a range of courses to support the development of your IT and information skills.
You are able to use many other university libraries through IOE’s participation in various co-operative access and borrowing schemes: full details are on the IOE website. Applications to use the University of London Library should be made at the library enquiry desk.
Information Services has up-to-date audiovisual and reprographic facilities, as well as a dedicated working space in which you can prepare learning and teaching resources in a variety of media formats.
You will have access to PC and Mac computers for personal study both in Information Services and throughout the Institute. Some computers are situated in rooms that are also used for teaching; in these cases, timetables indicating when rooms are booked for teaching are displayed outside the rooms and near the computing help desk. At very busy times a booking system for individual machines may be introduced, but outside these times you are welcome to use the computers as you need.
You will have access to word-processing and other software that can incorporate multi-lingual character sets, data management and analysis tools and presentation software. Fast internet access is freely available to all registered students via the Institute of Education network.
GSRU has also successfully negotiated a contract with CSA Illumina for online access to key social research databases, listed below. These are available on your desktop in GSR subscribing departments and are delivered mainly through departmental intranets through departmental libraries.
The databases available are:
This will be an invaluable resource when researching for assignments.
GSRU’s Magenta Book: Guidance notes for Policy Evaluation and Analysis will also assist you in your studies.