Towards evidence-based practice Towards evidence-based practice in science education

The Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) Research Network is part of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) – the largest programme of educational research ever conducted in the UK. EPSE is undertaking four related projects, whose overall aim is to help us understand better the relationship between science education research and practice, and thereby increase the impact of research, leading to improved learning of science by more pupils. The four EPSE projects are the only ones in the TLRP that focus specifically on science education. In this article, three of the EPSE projects are briefly outlined. A second article (also in this issue of SSR) discusses the fourth project. As the projects are still in progress, all the findings reported are interim ones. Introduction: The idea of evidence-based education Science teaching (like all teaching) involves making many decisions. Before teaching a topic, a teacher has to take decisions about the learning objectives and their relative priority, whether to follow a particular published scheme or devise their own order and sequence, what activities to include in each lesson, and so on. During every lesson, there is a constant stream of decisions about what to do next – let the current activity continue a bit longer, or make a change, what kinds of questions to ask, how long to allow pupils to answer, and so on. What informs all these decisions? What determines the actual choices made? Some are almost automatic, without much conscious reflection; others are deliberated over more overtly. To what extent are these influenced by knowledge that has arisen from science education research? We could ask the same sorts of questions about other practitioners in science education: policymakers, examiners, writers of textbooks and teaching resources. Or about people who take decisions about resource allocation at school or LEA level, many of which influence the way science is resourced and taught. These people also do jobs that involve them in making choices and decisions. What informs these decisions, and how big a role does knowledge from research play? The idea of ‘evidence-based education’ (or evidence-informed education) is that practice can be improved, leading to better outcomes for learners, if evidence from research is collected and applied systematically to inform the decisions that practitioners (of all sorts) have to take in the course of their work. Arguments for evidence-based education often draw parallels with medicine. Doctors also have to take many decisions. If we go to see a doctor, we expect him or her to have good reasons for the treatment recommended – some evidence that it is likely Towards evidence-based practice Millar 20 School Science Review, December 2002, 84(307) to work. We might be uneasy if we thought it was just based on tradition – ‘what we’ve always done’. We like to feel that our treatment is based on the most recent research, and there is evidence that it is the best way to treat our condition. Is it possible for science education to become more evidence-informed in this sense? Like all analogies, there are some aspects of this comparison that are thought-provoking and useful – and others where the parallels are not so clear. There are many examples of major initiatives being imposed on the education system without any systematic research to show that they are effective. Surely we ought to take a more ‘experimental’ approach to innovations – and indeed to some established practices – and test their effectiveness more rigorously before implementing them on the large scale. At the other end of the scale, there are the more local and smallscale decisions that individual teachers take about how they are going to teach X or Y to this year’s class. Often we make minor changes in the light of last year’s experience, or because of a new idea that we have thought of since then. Here it is probably not realistic (or even sensible) to expect such decisions to be based on knowledge arising from research – but they might still be informed by it, at either a general or a more specific level. In other respects, however, education is quite different from medicine. In medicine, the intended outcome (e.g. a return to health, or survival for five years) is agreed by everyone involved and is easily measured. In education, there may not be complete agreement in detail about the intended outcomes of a particular piece of teaching – and it may be very difficult to measure them reliably or validly. It is also often the case in educational contexts that an innovation or change produces less dramatic or clearcut change than might have been hoped for. For various reasons, the ‘system’ is not very sensitive to small changes. So it is harder than in many other fields to show that a change is having an effect – and, when we can, the size of the effect is often not very convincing to others whom we might want to influence. There are also the practical difficulties that in education we usually ‘treat’ classes rather than individuals, and that carefully controlled experiments to test if one way of doing something is better than another are very difficult to set up. These and other challenges will have to be overcome if science education is to become more ‘evidence-based’. This is a long-term project, not a ‘quick fix’. For that reason, the full title of EPSE is ‘Towards evidence-based practice in science education’. The best we can hope to achieve in the three years for which the Network is funded is a better understanding of the factors which facilitate or hinder the impact of science education research on practice, and some evidence that the application of knowledge from research can, under certain circumstances, lead to improved learning. Our main focus is on the teaching and learning of specific science ideas and ideas-about-science – and about how research on teaching and learning might inform this. The first two projects described below look at the teaching of specific science concepts and key ideas; the third looks at the teaching and learning of ‘ideas-about-science’ – the ideas and evidence strand of Sc1.