👍 Evidence-based education: expectations, barriers and pitfalls

Liked Evidence-based education: expectations, barriers and pitfalls by Dr Deborah Netolicky (cem.org)

A multiplicity of research approaches provides diverse ways of understanding education, but we need to interrogate the approaches and arrive at conclusions with caution. Teachers’ wisdom of practice and immersion in their own contexts needs to be honoured. Context and praxis matter in education.

7 responses on “👍 Evidence-based education: expectations, barriers and pitfalls”

  1. I find this all problematic Kevin. I feel that deciding that the supposed ‘child-led’ approach is at fault is no different to me questioning the ‘effect on what’ of the evidence-based approach. I wonder if what is really at fault is teacher agency. We need ‘evidence’, but surely this needs to be informed by context as well. I think that Dr. Deborah Netolicky captures this best when she says:

    A multiplicity of research approaches provides diverse ways of understanding education, but we need to interrogate the approaches and arrive at conclusions with caution. Teachers’ wisdom of practice and immersion in their own contexts needs to be honoured.

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  4. James Ladwig unpacks evidence-based approaches. In response to ‘synthetic reviews’, he suggests:

    Simply ask ‘effect on what?’ and you have a clear idea of just how limited such meta-analyses actually are.

    While in regards to RCT’s, he states:

    By definition, RCTs cannot tell us what the effect of an innovation will be simply because that innovation has to already be in place to do an RCT at all. And to be firm on the methodology, we don’t need just one RCT per innovation, but several – so that meta-analyses can be conducted based on replication studies.

    Another issue is that Research shows what has happened, not what will happen. This is not to say no to evidence, but a call to be sensible about what we think that we can learn from it.

    What it can do is provide a solid basis of knowledge for teachers to know and use in their own professional judgements about what is the best thing to do with their students on any given day. It might help convince schools and teachers to give up on historical practices and debates we are pretty confident won’t work. But what will work depends entirely on the innovation, professional judgement and, as Paul Brock once put it, nous of all educators.

    This touches on Mark Esner’s argument that great teacher will make anything work to a degree. Also, Deborah Netolicky’s observations about evidence.

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