** Based on the material presented in this
section, what do you feel is the appropriate role that empirical
evidence should play when making educational policy decisions? Do you
believe policy makers primarily rely on empirical evidence?
Empirical evidence should play a huge
role in policy decisions, assuming that the research has been done
well, is reproducible, and has external validity showing that the
results are likely to apply to the general population. Unfortunately
as mentioned in the videos, it's often hard to get good research.
Educational experiments on children may be unethical or just
infeasible. Observational studies may have confounding factors that
are actually responsible for the differences in results.
Quasi-experiments don't always happen for the factors you're trying
to study, or the results may not transfer to a more general set of
students.
Also any policy changes need to made
after looking at the whole research base, not just one or two
studies. As we often see in medicine, one study will show that
Vitamin X increases lifespan, and then a year later, another study
shows that Vitamin X decreases lifespan. Perhaps more research needs
to be done to figure out the actual effects of Vitamin X, or to see
if it affects different people differently. But policy should not
dictate that everyone gets huge doses of Vitamin X.
I think the policy makers are starting
to rely more on empirical evidence. More groups are gathering
research together in ways that non-researchers can better understand
-
http://coalition4evidence.org/
I feel like the main issues are not so
much with getting policy makers to recommend evidence-based
practices, but rather with getting schools to implement
evidence-based practices with fidelity. Scaling up programs that
work is the hard part. And unfortunately when programs aren't scaled
effectively, then the next set of research shows that the
intervention doesn't work – e.g. Head Start.
