Evidence based education

Have you ever had an idea that seems totally original and derived entirely from your own thinking, but actually turns out to have be quite well established when you look for information about it? This happened to me with evidence based education.

For some time now I have applied critical thought and skepticism to all facets of my life – to the point where it is automatic and I find that I have to think before I speak so that I don’t make people roll their eyes – work included. I think it was during a P.D. (professional development) session given by a speech pathologist that I first asked myself what evidence informed the concepts and activities that she was advocating. I didn’t give voice to my thoughts then but I must have carried it with me as I started to question all aspects of education practice.

In teaching there are a good number of things that we do that are based on conventional wisdom and carry the weight of tradition. Certain teaching practices it is believed work and are tried and tested. Many of these are informed by educational psychology and are based the stages of development that most children go through at a given age. An equal number seem to have no grounding in theory. Education is not inert and constantly evolves as new ideas come to the fore.

I had always assumed that these new ideas and ways of teaching were developed by academics in the education faculties of universities and based on research clearly demonstrating their effectiveness. I was mistaken. Often these new ways of doing things have been initiated by a teacher or teachers in a school, spotted by somebody else who has decided that it looks like a good idea and spread from there. Alternatively and academic might write a paper full of anecdotal evidence espousing the effectiveness of their latest idea and it is picked up by the education cognoscenti and implemented into education systems. Increasingly a third source of educational “wisdom” are those who seek to gain financially from spreading their ideas and products to as many people as possible.

Very little of what is done in schools is actaully based on any sort of scientific model. It seems logical that in order for a teaching method to be introduced or maintained that a hypothesis should be formed, experiments conducted as so its effectiveness and data collect, analysed and evaluated. Logic is often excluded in favour of opinion and belief. Not a recipe, one would have thought for success and this is evidenced in the rapid succession of new ideas that fall by the wayside of pedagogy. Look at outcomes based education, the whole language approach to teaching English and a myriad of other failed ideas.

In my research so far into evidence based education I have discovered a number of things. To some extent it does exist at a micro level. Schools collect data on the performance of their students and use this to assist their forward planning. In the case of learning areas such as maths such emperical evidence is easily collected and used. However, it is not used and cannot be used to evaluate specific strategies as these cannot be isolated in the data. Adjustments to curriculum are difficult to make and are either too small to be effective or too big, meaning that the data collected is not compatible with that which preceeded it.

Education policy is also moving toward a model of evidence based decision making. The tools used in this case are large scale standardised tests. Data is collected and poured over, but it is very difficult to link this to any large scale education policy. Policy, despite its lipservice to evidence continues to be driven by knee-jerk reactions and the popularist politics of decision makers. The top-down model of education policy formation.

Evidence based education provides an opportunity for real change at a grassroots level and bottom-up policy formation. A teacher, school, education district or education body can implement a new strategy and collect real evidence to inform further changes and refinement to their teaching strategies. By using groups of students in different contexts and creating control groups the real effectiveness of a new technique or model can be determined and its implementation evaluated. Instead of stabbing in the dark and hoping for success real success can be achieved.

Durham University in the UK has a department dedicated to the implementation of evidence based education their manifesto is interesting reading.