I have been invited to take part in a conference on the role of evidence in creating science education policy. I am thinking of broadening the debate about the role of evidence in developing policy and to what extent such evidence should be 'scientific'. I have a number of questions I am working with such as, what is evidence? What evidence counts? And to what extent should it be scientific?
Hi Cristina,
Very good question! Policy, in general, should be evidence based. But, evidence alone is not sufficient to make effective policy. That is why, for example, although there may be a positive correlation between class size and educational outcomes, not all schools have, say, 12 kids in Canadian classrooms, and while Australian government is in the process of introducing performance-based pay for Australian teachers, the move has divided the teaching profession and education scholars who – using evidence – argue for and against the policy.
“Scientific” evidence! That is a phrase by positivists who may be biased towards quantifiable evidence (e.g., school performance/ graduation rate/number of honours students etc improved by about 12% when the number of teachers or teachers’ salaries increased by 3%). That may be scientific evidence that can inform policy. How about evidence that is not quantifiable, that is not scientific such as teacher narratives of experience that may not be generalizable? Do we reject teacher experiences because they are nor scientific? I say no we cannot.
Thus, scientific evidence-based educational policy is important. But perhaps equally important are other variables such as interests of various actors and institutions (President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Mr. Hagel, is being criticized for saying that a ‘lobby’ group was too influential in policy making process by the Government of the United States); legal parameters and public acceptance (an illustration: we have ‘Afrocentric’ schools in Toronto, Canada – see http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/11/17/toronto-africentric-school-approved.html). Using evidence, most of which is not scientific, it has been shown that such schools are effective. I personally support them. In some societies such a policy/school would be branded racist).
Best wishes
James Alan Oloo
Faculty of Education
University of Regina
Canada
http://uregina.academia.edu/JamesAlanOloo
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