Evidence informed practice – its improvement purpose
With this article, we consider the engagement by teachers and school leaders in educational practices that are ‘evidence-informed’ - across school systems and world-wide. There is a growing consensus that effective teaching and leadership is based on evidence-informed practice (or EIP), and that EIP results in improving student learning and achievement.1
To provide a rough and ready definition, we suggest EIP can be thought of as the engagement in research and data by educators. Of course, there has to be purpose to this engagement and, in our experience, EIP is most effective when it is directed at improving aspects of educators’ teaching, decision-making, leadership or ongoing professional learning.2 In giving a more specific definition, we can say that EIP is what occurs in situations in which teaching and leadership practice is consciously informed by knowledge such as:
- formal research produced by researchers;
- evidence derived from practitioner inquiry; and/or
- evidence derived from routinely collected school or system-level data (for example, student assessment data).3
Why EIP?
In recent years there has emerged numerous imperatives, stretching across education systems from Chile to Australia, which seek to promote EIP. But why? It is perhaps most useful to contrast EIP against its alternative - the situation these imperatives are hoping to avoid. At its extreme, the position that is diametrically opposite to EIP is one of ‘repetition’ led practice: of teachers, once having finished their training, subsequently relying predominantly on their individual experiences of past classroom activity to guide how they engage with future cohorts of students. We might expect teachers to work for some 35 to 40 years.