We sometimes encounter unhelpful caricatures in discussions about evidence-informed teaching. One example is the idea that education research takes place in ivory towers with no understanding of classroom practices.
I am sure there is work that has little relevance for practitioners, but this doesn’t mean we need to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Many studies - sociological, classroom, econometric, psychological, pedagogical - can provide useful insights.
But even when studies are conducted in schools and classrooms, it is important to know more about the specific context. In what country did the research take place? What education phase are we talking about? What subjects have been looked at? It also matters a lot whether a school is a private school or not.
Classroom studies come in all shapes and sizes and it is important to know about these to see how relevant they are for any teacher’s own context.
Education research: exploring context
Who actually conducted the study is another important variable.
Systematic reviews seem to show, for example, that results from studies by external, independent evaluators yield smaller effects than if a study is led by the providers of an intervention, or schools themselves.
This is not all that surprising if you realise that teachers and students change their behaviour, positively and negatively, based on who they see in front of them.
The successful implementation of a classroom study also depends on the extent to which teachers really are going to do what the researcher asks them to do. This especially is a challenge with longer, multi-lesson interventions. Most teachers in England will not react favourably to a lengthy manual with micro-managed directives for their classrooms.
And how are you going to “control” what students can and can’t see if a study lasts several months? If studies have quite a short timespan, you can more easily make sure that only one aspect is changed at a time.
However, the quality of the materials also matters. I seldom see materials in psychological studies that really are good enough to use as a teacher. And even if you did, it would probably just be a one-off, rather short intervention. Yet teachers make much more extensive curriculum decisions in schools, of course, with many lessons a week.
In essence, you could correctly argue that every school is unique and has its own context, people are unique and even behave differently themselves at different times of the day.
So, are classroom studies useful at all? Like all research, this depends on what your expectations are. If the starting point is that you definitively want to know what works in a classroom, you will be disappointed. As Dylan Wiliam says: “Everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere.”
But this does not mean that all these different kinds of studies can’t tell us anything useful. We can look at other contexts, whether different schools, students, countries, teachers, classroom materials, and glean what perhaps might work.
It is then the craft of the experienced teacher that needs to transform it into successful classroom practices.
Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies
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