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The conference on “The Use of Evidence for Policy making in Education” was organized by the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI), in collaboration with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Education University of Hong Kong. The event was a valuable opportunity to gather examples and reflections from public and private sectors on how to collect and use research data to make decisions in education.
As Melanie Ehren pointed out in the introduction, when we talk about policy we are referring to a structured set of guidelines and operational interventions, such as financial incentives or persuasion actions. With evidence we mean data, research results, but also the knowledge possessed by operators in the sector.
Among the many speakers who attended, some emphasized how research evidence could be made available for consultation by schools and policy makers.
- John Kay presented the activities of the Education Endowment Foundation, an independent UK foundation specialising in the synthesis of research evidence and the accessible dissemination of its results. Many materials and resources are available at https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/. The foundation also runs projects to support networks of schools and other organisations in the use of evidence, and is committed to promoting an international network for the use of evidence in education.
- Annika Wilmers presented a systematic literature synthesis work on the topic of digital education conducted by the Liebniz Institute for Educational Research and Information (DIPF) in Germany. From approximately 500 selected studies, twenty summaries were produced, divided by themes and educational sectors. These were then made available through a series of popular products (manual-style books, podcasts, webinars) aimed at different types of recipients. The institute then collected information on the number of users of the products. The question of how and whether this evidence is used in practice remains open.
Other interventions instead described how national institutions and international organizations are moving to promote a research-oriented decision-making process.
- Marcela Morales from On Think Thanks (OTT) presented the spread of “policy labs”, laboratories formed by researchers and politicians in different countries with the aim of institutionalizing the use of evidence in education. The functioning of these laboratories has been mapped in countries with very different levels of development of the educational system (Ghana, Ivory Coast, Colombia and Switzerland). The laboratories have been classified based on their greater or lesser control by government structures. Their role is mainly to be intermediaries between different stakeholders. More information on the program is available here https://onthinktanks.org/publication/review-policy-labs-and-evidence-use-in-education/
- Rien Row presented the experience of the “Science for policy project”, activated by the Department of Knowledge of the Ministry of Education Dutch . The project worked in the following way: identifying a theme perceived as relevant; selecting academics with expertise on the topic from different fields, in order to provide more perspectives; realizing some working meetings, in which all the actors sitting at the table - politicians and academics - are equally recognized as experts.
- Nora Revai described the work carried out by the OECD Center for Educational Research and Innovation to strengthen the impact of educational research in member countries. The center has structured in-depth seminars with some countries on relevant educational policy issues, in order to develop self-reflection and collective evidence-based analysis. For example, with the Netherlands, the curriculum revision process was examined, while with Flemish Belgium, the introduction of standardized tests. Again, both policy makers and academics took part in the seminars. Essential elements of the analysis conducted were the reconstruction of the trajectory over time of the educational policy examined, as well as the identification of the different actors involved and the available resources. More information on the project is available here https://www.oecd.org/en/about/projects/strengthening-the-impact-of-education-research.html
- Mukdarut Bangpan presented a project conducted for the World Health Organization (WTO). The project aimed to identify the main factors at play in evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM), using Thailand as a case study. The factors identified are the country's culture, governance, national standards and practices, resources and capacity building, leadership and partnerships. The research output was a radar chart map, in which the different facilitating factors are represented based on their greatest presence or intensity in the country studied.
There were also interventions that showed the non-linearity of the process of using evidence, highlighting critical points or points that require further reflection.
- Gill Adams from the Sheffield Institute of Education presented qualitative research, using interviews, focus groups and lifelogging, to understand how primary school teachers in England think about research and what evidence they use. The study found that teachers conceptualise what research means very differently to the academy. It also found that there is a wide range of individuals and organisations involved in the mediation between research and practice, and that academic research is often perceived as something imposed from above. A key factor in facilitating teachers’ encounters with research is the availability of time and space for discussion and exchange, and the role of leadership was therefore highlighted.
Participants were able to engage in an interactive way in the parallel sessions. With my colleague Anton Florek, as co-coordinators of the 3P network (Policymakers, Politicians and Practitioners) of ICSEI, together with the event chairs Paul Campell and Melanie Ehren, we facilitated the debate and summarized the ideas that emerged in some posters. The themes on which we discussed were three:
- Structural conditions and traditions that influence the use of evidence
- Conceptions and perceptions of research engagement
- What Works an for Sharing and Using Research Evidence
Finally, the panel with members of some school councils representing Dutch schools was very stimulating. The representatives of the school councils explained how they use evidence to make decisions in their contexts. An example of highly structured use of evidence is represented by the Learning Analytics tools, which through a dashboard propose the visualization of the results of the students by achievement band and over time, thus offering specific indications to the school council on where to intervene. An opposite example is instead represented by a group of schools with a high immigration rate, in which priority was given to rebuilding relationships of trust between school and family. The collection of information is mainly qualitative, through the dialogue of teachers with parents.
Some points for the Innovation and Development area INVALSI
Overall, the elements collected can represent a wealth of ideas and resources to draw on to support the activities of the Innovation and Development area of Invalsi.
The research conducted by the Innovation and Development area, in fact, is often characterized by an intertwining of educational research and school policy. I am thinking in particular of the research that evaluated school interventions to promote transversal skills and student orientation (PCTO), and also of the new projects on the evaluation of school inclusion and on Learning Analytics as a tool to ensure quality at school. This intertwining emerges especially in two moments:
- in the initial research setting phase, when in order to effectively structure the project it is essential to map past and present educational policies and the various actors involved
- in the final phase of dissemination of the results, when we would like to encourage a greater connection between the research evidence produced and its use for school policy interventions
Taking inspiration from international experiences, we could also think in our working context of activating policy laboratories on specific themes, composed of researchers and educational policy makers. As the Amsterdam event highlighted, the connection between research evidence and policy making is not an automatic process, but requires dedicated and carefully constructed paths, respecting the different actors involved. The need to intervene to reduce the distances between research and policy-making is felt both at the micro and meso level, in schools and territorial government offices, and at the macro-system level and therefore of national policies. We could therefore identify one of these levels to activate a structured path of comparison between different interlocutors. Our research area could play a pioneering role for our institute. In fact, working on these themes could also be beneficial for other research and for institutional activities, since promoting the use of evidence to develop effective educational policies represents a topic of general interest for a research body such as INVALSI.
The event program with abstracts of the speakers' speeches is available here.
Finally, I would like to point out that together with ICSEI we would like to present the results of the event in the next issue of the popular magazine ICSEI Dialogic .
