The Trials Of Evidence Based Education

There has been a recent worldwide move towards demanding evidence-based policy and practice in education, with policy-makers and practitioners wanting more practical and coherent answers from research. Funding schemes such as the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, the US Institute of Education Sciences, and the Educational Endowment Foundation in England have been set up to provide the kind of robust practical evaluation research that more traditional funders â such as the research councils and charities in the UK â have tended to ignore. There are even new funding streams (such as the pupil premium for schools in England) allowing schools and others to take advantage of the new evidence generated by implementing evidence-based reforms. This book presents innovative methods for the design, conduct, analysis and use of evidence from robust evaluations like educational trials. The book describes the promise, the problems and the new opportunities as the attention of funders moves from only being interested in attainment outcomes to political concern about character-building and wider educational impacts. [Preface, ed].

The Trials of Evidence-based Education explores the promise, limitations and achievements of evidence-based policy and practice, as the attention of funders moves from a sole focus on attainment outcomes to political concern about character-building and wider educational impacts. Providing a detailed look at the pros, cons and areas for improvement in evidence-based policy and practice, this book includes consideration of the following: What is involved in a robust evaluation for education. The issues in conducting trials and how to assess the trustworthiness of research findings. New methods for the design, conduct, analysis and use of evidence from trials and examining their implications. What policy-makers, head teachers and practitioners can learn from the evidence to inform practice. In this well-structured and thoughtful text, the results and implications of over 20 studies conducted by the authors are combined with a much larger number of studies from their systematic reviews, and the implications are spelled out for the research community, policy-makers, schools wanting to run their own evaluations, and for practitioners using evidence.

"Where does hunch end and evidence begin? Too much is written and said about school improvement - about improvements in teaching and learning - with far too little attention to this question. This book provides vivid discussion from distinguished protagonists and antagonists about what gets called 'evidence-based practice'. Reading it, all involved in education - policymakers and practitioners alike - can proceed more confidently."- Professor Tim Brighouse, London Schools Commissioner The movement to evidence-based practice in education is as important as it is controversial, and this book explores the arguments of leading advocates and critics. The book begins with an explication of evidence-based practice. Some of the ideas of its proponents are discussed, including the Campbell Collaboration, and the application to education of Cochrane-style reviews and meta-analyses. The thinking behind evidence based practice has been the subject of much criticism, particularly in education, and this criticism is aired in the second part of the book. Questions have been raised about what we mean by evidence, about how particular kinds of evidence may be privileged over other kinds of evidence, about the transferability of research findings to practice, and about the consequences of a move to evidence-based practice for governance in education. Given that the origins of the interest in evidence-based practice come largely from its use in medicine, questions arise about the validity of the transposition, and contributors to the third part of the book address this transposition. The issues raised in the book, while primarily those raised by educators, are of relevance also to professionals in medicine, social work and psychology.

There is a recent surge in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) within education globally, with disproportionate claims being made about what they show, ‘what works’, and what constitutes the best ‘evidence’. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship from across the world, Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education critically addresses the increased use of RCTs in education, exploring their benefits, limits and cautions, and ultimately questioning the prominence given to them. While acknowledging that randomized controlled trials do have some place in education, the book nevertheless argues that this place should be limited. Drawing together all arguments for and against RCTs in a comprehensive and easily accessible single volume, the book also adds new perspectives and insights to the conversation; crucially, the book considers the limits of their usefulness and applicability in education, raising a range of largely unexplored concerns about their use. Chapters include discussions on: The impact of complexity theory and chaos theory. Design issues and sampling in randomized controlled trials. Learning from clinical trials. Data analysis in randomized controlled trials. Reporting, evaluating and generalizing from randomized controlled trials. Considering key issues in understanding and interrogating research evidence, this book is ideal reading for all students on Research Methods modules, as well as those interested in undertaking and reviewing research in the field of education.

"Evidence-based education" (EBE) is a catchline for policy makers and school leaders alike, with its advocates promoting their work as being "rigorous" and "scientific". The chapters in this book, written by leading educators and philosophers, place this approach in context and challenge whether the arguments it leads to live up to the hype. EBE advocates promote particular, restricted approaches to determining policy and practice in schools, with only some forms of evidence accepted as legitimate. Experimental methods designed for the well-controlled environments of science and medicine in which subjects and treatments can be isolated are nonetheless promoted as ‘the gold standard’ even when transposed to complex social situations of interacting teachers and learners. This book explores some of the problems with this approach. It examines the background to disputes about evidence, the reasons EBE arguments have become so powerful in modern bureaucracies, the way practitioners might reason using evidence and the concerns about key notions of rigour, science, representativeness and effect size, which are often mistakenly interpreted in EBE. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Educational Research and Evaluation.

Drawing on their own extensive experience of running RCTs, this book provides a thorough, practical introduction to the use of RCTs in education. It also examines the controversial aspects of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) in education and sets out the potential and pitfalls of the method.

"A compendium of empirically verified instructional methods derived from research in behavioral analysis. Coverage includes precision teaching, direct instruction, computerized teaching, and personalized system of instruction, as well as discussing the use of peer tutoring, and chapters specific to teaching language, cognition, grammar and writing"--Book jacket.

This volume draws together interdisciplinary approaches from political philosophy, social work, medicine and sociology to analyze the theoretical foundations and practical examples of evidence-based and evidence-informed education for the public good. It presents a range of conceptions of the evidence-based and evidence-informed education and a justification for why the particular examples or issues chosen fit within that conception for the sake of public good. It explores the current literature on evidence-based and evidence-informed educational policy, research and practice, and introduces a new term, ‘evidence free’, meaning actions of some policymakers who disregard or misuse evidence for their own agenda. The demands about the quality and relevance of educational research to inform the policy and practice have been growing over the past decade in response to the Evidence-Based Education movement. However the literature is yet to tackle the question of the interrelationships between evidence, research, policy and practice in education for the public good in an international context. This book fills that gap.