British Council research grants: 2024 updates to the review processes for interim and final reports

In 2023 and 2024, the British Council’s research-award group, called the “Assessment Research Awards and Grants (ARAGs) Reports Group,” undertook a project to revise how it conducted its reviews of interim and final reports. This group has expanded since 2024, and the group currently (2025) awards grants to researchers exploring English-language learning and English-language assessment. The group works to establish the British Council as a global leader and product innovator in the fields of English language education and English language assessment. In August of 2023, the group brought on Paula Winke (Michigan State University) to serve as a Senior Editor on the project. Paula Winke, Mina Patel, and Maddy Gilliam, along with other members of the ARAG Editorial Team at the British Council, worked together to update the group’s following processes: 1. How researchers who just received new funding from the program would be onboarded through a video-conferenced “Grant Kick-Off” meeting. At this meeting, the grant-awardees would receive copies of the documents within this deposit. The documents would be explained to the new awardees by the Senior Editor or Editor leading the kick-off meeting. 2. How internal British Council experts would conduct their expert-review of interim and final reports. We developed the uploaded document “BritishCouncil-ARAG-0-GuidelinesForReviewingProjectReports-withAppendices.pdf”, which is a revised version of an earlier document the group was already using. The appendices to the document are new (as of 2023-2024). 3. How internal British Council experts would direct external, peer-reviewers of interim and final reports. Information regarding this is additionally in the uploaded document “BritishCouncil-ARAG-0-GuidelinesForReviewingProjectReports-withAppendices.pdf”. 4. How the British Council provides guidance to grant-award winners on how to respond to comments and requests for revisions in relation to expert and peer-review feedback on their interim and final reports. For this we prepared the “BritishCouncil-ARAG-1-AuthorInformation&TitlePage.pdf”, the “BritishCouncil-ARAG-2-AuthorSubmissionCoverSheet.pdf”, and a set of up-to-date links to trusted resources on writing responses to reviewers, some of which have example responses, which would be shared with the authors. Three resources we referred authors to in 2023-2024 are as follows: • APA Style. (n.d). Response to reviewers. American Psychological Association. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/research-publication/response-reviewers#:~:text=Authors%20should%20distinguish%20their%20responses,%2C%20and%2For%20line • Nobel, W. S. (2017). Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(10), article e1005730. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005730 • Sage. (n.d.) Response to reviewers template. https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/response-to-reviewers-template 5. How the British Council advises grant-report authors to publish open-access once their final report has been accepted by the British Council. To help direct grant-awardees toward publishing open-access, we prepared the document “BritishCouncil-ARAG-4-SupportForPublishingOpenAccess.pdf”. One stipulation at the time (2023-2024) was that all editor, reviewer, and author correspondence would be channeled through one ARAG email account at the British Council. That is, the review processes and all materials were designed with individuals instructed to submit materials or questions, at any point in time and regarding the delivery of any document, to [email protected]. At the end of the one-year project, we and the British Council decided to publish the main materials that resulted from the project on the OSF. It is the hope of the British Council that other small to medium-sized organizations that award research grants and that have in place formalized reviews of the projects’ interim and final reports will benefit from reviewing these documents and in understanding the infrastructure that guided the project. We would like to note that we suspect that these materials and our processes may change over time as the program necessarily advances. Nonetheless, we welcome any feedback or questions about the project and these archived documents.