Description
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.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: the state of education research 2. The changing incentives and infrastructure for robust evaluations 3. Problems, abuses and limitations in the conduct of trials 4. Assessing the trustworthiness of a research finding 5. In-depth evidence and process evaluations 6. A short sharp shock?: the transition to secondary school 7. What works for catch-up literacy and numeracy? 8. More of the same or radical changes to the way we teach? 9. Educating the whole person or just a cheap way to improve results? 10. What are the lessons for those concerned with robust evaluations?
