A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine

ABSTRACT

The paradigm of evidence-based education continues to inform the development of policy in a number of countries. At its simplest level, evidence-based education incorporates evidence, often that provided by randomised controlled trials, into classroom practice. England’s Education Endowment Foundation is in the process of exporting evidence-based school education, promoted as a medical approach, to other countries, including Australia. Australia is in the process of establishing an Education Evidence Base, informed by the government’s 2016 Productivity Commission report. While the literature around evidence-based education is explicit in identifying its basis in medicine, there has been little medical input into its development. Interdisciplinary examination of the medical literature reveals the contested nature and troubled state of evidence-based medicine and what policymakers need to consider to maximise the benefits of this translation into education.     

‘Seeing through different eyes’: exploring the value of participative research using images in schools

This article is an exploration of the value of research involving images in a school, and aims to provoke more general discussion of the purpose, value and risks of educational research using images. It reports on a participative research project in a secondary school which led to the construction of a web site based on images of that school. The value of the process and of the web site in promoting learning within the school community is discussed and assessed, along with the risks of abuse, misuse, and manipulation of those images. The authors consider the value of grouping and clustering the images generated in this project as a means of engaging meaningfully with the images themselves, their context and what they represent. Data are presented from discussions with students and staff involved in taking images, with further reflection on the process that they and we engaged in.     

Further Testing Hope’s Role in Constructive Conflict Communication

Using three waves of data, this study examined the relationship between dispositional hope and constructive conflict communication (i.e., “voice” behaviors) in adult romantic relationships. The primary goal was to test if dispositional hope directly predicted voice or if the hope–voice link is mediated by the more relationally proximal variable of conflict efficacy. Results of cross-lagged panel model analysis showed that hope directly predicted voice, even when controlling for variables, such as optimism, general self-efficacy, commitment, and alternative forms of conflict communication. Implications for hope theory-based relational interventions and future research of hope and conflict communication are discussed.     

Teachers' Self-evaluation of Knowledge,Skills and Personality Characteristics Needed to Manage Change

For some time, change has been the driving force in language teaching and learning. This seems to be even truer today than it was in the past, and seems set to be even more so in the future, which raises the questions of how to identify what is known and what is needed by teachers managing the changes, and how to address any needs. In this study, we asked 35 experienced secondary school teachers of English in Hong Kong to rate their own change-related knowledge, skills and personality characteristics, to find out how they would rate themselves in the various areas, and to consider whether such information can be of use in identifying change-related support needs. The results show that the teachers self-assessed some of their change-related knowledge, skills and personality characteristics as more and some less developed than others. Reasons are put forward to explain these different ratings, and ways in which such information might be used to identify teachers' change-related needs are discussed.     

Multidisciplinary exhibit design in a Science Centre: a participatory action research approach

In this paper we highlight the issues and opportunities of a participatory action research (PAR) and co-design project, currently being undertaken as engaged research between academics at Durham University and practitioners at the UK’s International Centre for Life in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (CfL; see creativescienceatlife.com for more information and developments). The focus is on the use of PAR to enable university researchers and Science Centre professionals to co-design Informal Science Learning exhibits that enhance creativity and innovation in young people. We define the principles of PAR and explore reasons for adopting the approach. An account is provided of the iterative co-design and piloting of a novel exhibit within a new exhibition space at the CfL. Reflections collated independently by the practitioners and the academics involved highlighting the development of ideas and insights over the course of the PAR process. We discuss how PAR enabled effective engagement with and creation of enriched knowledge, and innovation, in both the academy and science-learning professionals. The added value of PAR and co-production to our project aligns with current calls for a redefining of how societal impact of academic research is considered.     

Being human: Transdisciplinarity in nursing

Nursing as an academic discipline typically draws on a wide range of other disciplines. There is debate about whether this is a sound basis for the discipline, or whether nursing needs to develop a distinctive body of knowledge. The concept of transdisciplinarity, though little discussed in nursing, is of considerable value in understanding nursing as an academic discipline, and provides a possible resolution to the debate above. In order to get a better understanding of what transdisciplinarity might mean in a nursing context, we conducted a qualitative interview-based study of faculty in a UK school of nursing. The debate about nursing’s status as a discipline was reproduced by the interviewees. Despite these differences, a degree of consensus emerged about the concept of nursing as a transdisciplinary discipline. Transdisciplinarity in nursing offers an overarching approach that is applicable to a broader range of disciplines. This approach offers the possibility of moving beyond some of the major debates in nursing as an academic discipline. This broad and pragmatic approach grounds nursing knowledge in nursing practice, which means that as a transdisciplinary discipline it does not overstate its claims to knowledge, but instead explicitly acknowledges tacit and ‘craftsmanship’-type forms of knowledge.     

Definitions of bullying: a comparison of terms used,and age and gender differences,in a fourteen-country international comparison

The study of school bullying has recently assumed an international dimension, but is faced with difficulties in finding terms in different languages to correspond to the English word bullying. To investigate the meanings given to various terms, a set of 25 stick-figure cartoons was devised, covering a range of social situations between peers. These cartoons were shown to samples of 8- and 14-year-old pupils (N = 1,245; n = 604 at 8 years, n = 641 at 14 years) in schools in 14 different countries, who judged whether various native terms cognate to bullying, applied to them. Terms from 10 Indo-European languages and three Asian languages were sampled. Multidimensional scaling showed that 8-year-olds primarily discriminated nonaggressive and aggressive cartoon situations; however, 14-year-olds discriminated fighting from physical bullying, and also discriminated verbal bullying and social exclusion. Gender differences were less appreciable than age differences. Based on the 14-year-old data, profiles of 67 words were then constructed across the five major cartoon clusters. The main types of terms used fell into six groups: bullying (of all kinds), verbal plus physical bullying, solely verbal bullying, social exclusion, solely physical aggression, and mainly physical aggression. The findings are discussed in relation to developmental trends in how children understand bullying, the inferences that can be made from cross-national studies, and the design of such studies.     

Norm-referenced,Criterion-referenced,and Dynamic Assessment: What exactly is the point?

Assessment of individual children and young people has remained a major focus of professional activity for educational psychologists (EPs) and one surrounded by continuing controversy. Despite the arguments of the 'reconstructing movement' of the 1970s, and ensuing debates, individual assessment has survived seemingly as strong as ever. Subsumed within arguments concerning the prominence given to individual assessment, another set of discussions has concerned the paradigms from which such professional activity might derive. Located among constructs contrasting environment with individual and static with interactive perspectives, the particular debate within individual assessment has centred on the relative merits of norm-referenced, criterion-referenced, curriculum-based and dynamic methods. This article presents a taxonomy of purposes and procedures deriving from these major assessment paradigms. This collection is illustrated by examples taken from EP reports, and the relative familiarity and use of each approach by one major audience group is evaluated through examining questionnaire responses from 59 Special Educational Needs Coordinators within one Local Education Authority.