Research and the use of evidence has had a welcome resurgence among educational practitioners. The development of teacher-led initiative researchED, the growth of attainment-focused charity Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), and the direction being taken by the Chartered College of Teaching and its FE sister, the Society for Education and Training, all confirm this.
The increasing rapprochement between the worlds of research and teaching is mirrored in a powerful report from the combined forces of the Royal Society and British Academy. By bringing together the sciences and humanities at the highest level, these bodies have produced an all-encompassing report on the state of educational research and its use today.
Amid increasing concern about whether fashionable interventions actually make any difference to educational performance, there’s no better time to be putting the evidence system in the spotlight. The report, Harnessing Educational Research (bit.ly/HarnessingResearch), pulls no punches in its evidence-based critique of the current UK system of research production, policymaking and practice. But it also offers a tightly argued set of recommendations for government, research councils and professional bodies in education.
For the classroom teacher or lecturer, the test will be whether high-level system changes, where they occur, lead to positive changes on the ground.
The principal call in the report is for the creation of an Office for Educational Research to “enable the actors to discuss and debate together their research priorities, and to co-develop research strategies for addressing them”. Crucially, from the point of view of schools, colleges and early years centres, this would involve teachers coming together with representatives from government, research and funding organisations. In particular, it cites umbrella bodies, such as the Chartered College of Teaching, as being central to this.
The report also focuses on the kind of research that is needed for educational improvement. Studies dating back to the National Education Research Forum in the late 1990s have pointed to the mismatch between research topics that attract funding within academic disciplines and those that directly improve classroom practice. A case in point is the paucity of research on specific topics in secondary subjects - capitalising on field-trip learning in geography, explaining quantum effects in physics or memorising inflections in French, for example.
To tackle the practical challenges at a local level, knowledge from multiple research disciplines is needed - experimental psychology, child development, neuroscience, sociology and management studies to name but a few. Interdisciplinary approaches are proving crucial throughout the humanities and sciences; the report not only emphasises this point, but adds that multidisciplinary teams need to be informed by evidence from teachers, as well as policymakers and researchers.
Another key contribution of teachers, once they have acquired sufficient experience, is to consider moving into research themselves. The supply of researchers is a growing concern, as the age profile in academia rises. To meet this challenge, the report calls for more part-time research studentships to enable more teachers to develop as researchers and enter academia.
And what about reviews? Studies of research use in Canada, the US, UK, EU and across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development participating countries have pointed to the importance of what is now termed “knowledge mobilisation”. Activities such as pulling together separate studies, translating their key messages for practice and producing evidence-based guidance based on them, need to be funded in addition to the original research upon which they are based.
The report calls for “an appropriate balance between the support for strategically directed research, for innovative ‘blue skies’ research, and for knowledge-mobilisation activities”. Organisations such as the EEF, Chartered College of Teaching, Association of Colleges and Gatsby Foundation are currently embarking on innovative projects along these lines in specific areas, including metacognition and the training of teachers in technical subjects. There is enormous scope for scaling this up to cover the full range of issues faced at classroom level.
The report points out, in particular, that research synthesis is underdeveloped in education. It suggests that the proposed Office for Educational Research could bring together the various communities to identify research areas requiring synthesis, and to encourage the adoption of common approaches to ensure the findings have a practical application.
Huge strides have been made in this respect in healthcare since the 1980s; this has had a major influence on the identification of effective (and ineffective) practices, and resulted in dramatic improvements in the care of the sick. There are clearly important differences between health and education in the extent and nature of the research base, but there remains plenty of room to capitalise on existing knowledge locked up in unread single studies.
Finally, the report also responds to an increasing awareness that practitioners are not likely to change their method of teaching simply through the provision of a how-to guide.
Studies of research use across sectors as diverse as policing, healthcare, social services and education show that effective changes in practice require structural and cultural change at many levels. For example, local leadership teams need to encourage an evidence-using culture; professional standards must embody expectations about evidence use; and inspection protocols should offer incentives to encourage it.
The report recommends that government departments “make clear their expectation that teachers should be informed by and engaged in research”. It also calls for research-informed practice to be recognised within the professional standards for teachers, the requirements for initial teacher education and professional development, and the expectations of inspectorates.
So will the report make a noticeable difference in your local college, nursery or school? The legacy of previous reports like this is not encouraging. But will the credibility of the two august bodies behind this report make a difference this time? I think there’s chance it will.
The Department for Education is funding research at the EEF directed at real issues of effective teaching and learning; some charitable bodies and business organisations are adding to this. Above all, it’s the detectable change in teacher attitudes to evidence that could make the difference. The popularity of researchED, the focus of the chartered college and the Society for Education and Training, and the upsurge in teacher-led research, may yet herald a change that forces public bodies to take notice of the recommendations in the report.
Andrew Morris is president of the British Science Association (education section), as well as chair of both the Coalition for Evidence-Based Education and Education Media Centre
