How To Assist Research-Informed Education?

Abstract

This paper looks at some of the key decisions to be faced in promoting the use of research evidence in policy and practice – the quality of the evidence to be used, and how that quality can be judged. Once the policy/school context has determined the issues to be faced, and before the professional judgement of policy-makers/teachers is used to help carry this out, evidence should presumably inform the decision on how to address those issues. However, there is a large amount of apparent research evidence on most topics, and much of that research is very weak. Who decides which evidence is appropriate to use, and how is that judgement made? This paper illustrates the issues with reference to examples drawn from what works summaries, using a generic approach to judging quality, and shows that deciding on the relative quality of research evidence is paramount in whether evidence use will be effective or not. The paper continues by considering the difficulties for users and others in judging the quality of research, but argues that this problem must be solved. The only real alternative would be for practitioners to have purported evidence-led approaches thrust upon them, while policy-makers would presumably continue to evade the imperative to use evidence appropriately themselves.