Improving Subject Teaching

Lessons from Research in Science Education

Robin Millar, John Leach, Jonathan Osborne, Mary Ratcliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134232925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In many countries, questions are being raised about the quality and value of educational research. This book explores the relationship between research and practice in education. It looks at the extent to which current practice could be said to be informed by knowledge or ideas generated by research and at the extent to which the use of current practices or the adoption of new ones are, or could be, supported by research evidence. Science education is used as a case study but the issues considered apply to the teaching and learning of any curriculum subject.

The book draws on the findings of four inter-related research studies and considers:

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• how research might be used to establish greater consensus about curriculum;

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• how research can inform the design of assessment tools and teaching interventions;

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• teachers' and other science educators' perceptions of the influence of research on their teaching practices and their students' learning;

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• the extent to which evidence can show that an educational practice 'works'.

Part I
What is the issue?

Chapter 1
Research and practice in education

Authored by Robin Millar, John Leach, Jonathan Osborne and Mary Ratcliffe

Education research is often criticised for having little impact on practice or policy. This book looks at the influence of research on the teaching of a curriculum subject. It asks what research can offer practitioners and policy makers in making choices and decisions about how a curriculum subject should be taught – and considers how research might need to change to influence practice in subject teaching more strongly. In this opening chapter, we try to disentangle two issues: the role of research in the design of teaching, and the extent to which research can provide a warrant (or justification) for teaching something in one way rather than another. We also summarise some of the key ideas and claims in the recent debate about the role and quality of education research, looking in particular at the suggestion that research in medicine and health provides a model for education research to follow.

Introduction

The past decade has seen a growing demand, in many countries, that education should become more ‘evidence-based’ – that is, that research should provide evidence to inform choices and decisions about educational matters. This demand has come particularly from those involved in educational policy making, and is part of a wider debate about the quality of public services in general, and the role of research in informing the decisions which practitioners and policy makers must inevitably make (Davies et al. 2000). Research, it is argued, provides a better basis for choice and action than tradition or ‘professional wisdom’. It can challenge ineffective current practices; and provides a means of testing innovations so that only those which are seen to be effective are widely implemented. As David Blunkett, speaking in 2000 as Secretary of State for Education and Employment in the UK, put it:

We need to be able to rely on … social scientists to tell us what works and why and what types of policy initiatives are likely to be most effective.

(Blunkett 2000:2)

This is very much the policy maker’s perspective. How does the research– practice interface look from the viewpoint of the practitioner? Most teachers spend most of their working lives teaching a subject, or group of subjects. Most of the decisions that teachers routinely take are about the detail of how to plan and implement lessons that develop their students’ ideas, skills and attitudes within a subject area. If educational research is to have an impact on practice, and be seen to have an impact, it is decisions of this sort that it must influence. Hence, it is on this issue, of the current influence of research on teachers’ everyday practice and how it might be increased, that we want to focus in this book. Our reason for starting from the practitioner’s perspective is not that we think the role of research in informing policy is less important. Far from it. But research-informed policy can only mean support and encouragement of practices that have themselves been shown to be soundly conceived and effective when implemented. The key questions, then, which we want to explore in this book might be summarised as follows:

• What contribution can research make to improving the teaching and learning of a school curriculum subject?

• Can research help us to improve the way subjects are taught, and the learning that ensues?

• If so, what kind of help can we reasonably expect research to provide: new information, perspectives or insights that we may need to consider and take into account; or clear and compelling evidence that certain interventions ‘work’ or do not?

• How should research be designed and carried out if it is to provide the kind of knowledge that can lead to practical improvements?

We will approach these questions from the perspective of one curriculum subject – science. The issues which they raise are not, however, specific to science education. They apply equally to the teaching of any curriculum subject. We have chosen to focus on science because that is the subject we know best. But it is only an example. We hope that readers who are interested in the teaching and learning of other subjects will be able to relate the discussion to their interests.

To argue that the teaching and learning of science (or of any other curriculum subject) should become more ‘evidence-based’ implies that research is capable of generating knowledge that makes possible the more effective teaching of specific bodies of knowledge and the skills and attitudes associated with them. The aim of this book is to explore critically the extent to which such a view can be sustained, identify the conditions which would have to be met to make it possible, and explore its strengths and limitations as a strategy for improving practice. The book arises from the work of the Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) Research Network, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) within the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). In the original research proposal, the Network’s title was ‘Towards evidence-based practice in science education’. That ‘towards’ is important despite its subsequent omission from the Network’s shorthand name; indeed the title should perhaps be read with a question mark at the end. The aim of the Network was to improve our understanding of the interface between science education research and practice, and to explore what might be involved in moving school science education towards forms of practice that might be termed more ‘evidence-based’. To this end, the Network undertook four projects, which are interrelated and were carried out in parallel rather than sequentially:

Project 1:	Exploring the impact on teachers’ practices, and student learning, of providing diagnostic tools informed by previous research on student learning.
Project 2:	Developing and evaluating short teaching sequences that are explicitly informed by research evidence.
Project 3:	Establishing the extent of ‘expert’ agreement on what people should know about the nature of scientific knowledge and the procedures of scientific enquiry, and exploring the practical implications of trying to teach the ideas seen as most important.
Project 4:	Documenting and analysing science education practitioners’ views on the actual and potential influence of research on their everyday practices.

Summaries of each of these projects are presented in the Appendix. Our intention in this book, however, is not simply to report and discuss the findings and outcomes of each in turn, but to use them together to explore a number of general issues and themes about the nature of research evidence in education and its relationship to practice.

Research, evidence and practice

To explore systematically the relationships between research and practice, and the ideas of ‘evidence-based’ or ‘evidence-informed’ practice, we need to clarify some terms, and develop a framework for exploring systematically the relationship between evidence (or knowledge) and practical choices and decisions. The task of developing and testing a comprehensive model of the complex interrelationships between research and practice is beyond the scope of this book. What we need is a model that is ‘good enough’ to provide a framework for discussion of the issues.

First, though, a word about the two terms ‘evidence’ and ‘practice’. To call for education to become ‘evidence-based’ seems to imply that current practices are not based on ‘evidence’. This is clearly untenable if taken literally: any rational human activity that involves participants in making choices and decisions clearly requires them to draw on past experience and learning – that is, on evidence. The issue is the kind, and the quality, of the evidence that is used. ‘Evidence’ in the phrase ‘evidence-based education’ clearly means ‘evidence produced by research’, that is, evidence collected through a systematic process of data collection and analysis, open to public scrutiny and, in principle at least, replicable by anyone who chooses to do so.

It is also worth clarifying what we mean by ‘practice’. The phrase ‘evidence-based practice’ treats ‘practice’ as though it were a single category. But in reality, there are many different kinds of educational ‘practices’ that we might wish to make more ‘evidence-based’. Some concern general aspects of school organisation and procedure (such as decisions about class size, or about expenditure on books compared to that on computers). Others are about teaching approaches that could be applied across all subjects (such as using formative assessment) or across all topics within a subject (such as the use of small-group practical work in science). These are ‘practices’ that a school or a department might choose to adopt in place of other alternatives. At a more content-specific level, there are the practices that a teacher or a school department follows in teaching specific topics (for example, the teaching scheme and materials used for teaching elementary electric circuit theory in lower secondary school) or even specific key ideas (such as the model of a chemical reaction as a rearrangement of atoms into new combinations).

A critical feature of all of these kinds of practices except the first (general aspects of school organisation and procedure) is that content matters. In other words, the quality of the decisions and choices made depends not only on general principles and criteria (perhaps deriving from some kind of theoretical position or analysis) but also on knowledge of and about the specific content being taught. This is clearly so for content-specific practices but is also true of generic practices that can be applied across subjects or across topics within a subject, such as formative assessment. These can only be implemented in the context of teaching some specific content – and the success or failure of the resulting practice will depend not only on the validity of the generic principle per se but also on how it is implemented with the chosen content. Again the decisions and choices involved depend on knowledge of and about that content. It is largely for this reason that we believe it essential to consider issues of ‘evidence-based practice’ from the perspective of the teaching of a specific subject.

How then might we begin to model the relationships between research evidence and practice? A central element of any such model is the knowledge base on which teachers draw in making decisions and choices. Research and informal experience both suggest that this includes a range of types of knowledge, acquired from a variety of sources (e.g. Brown and McIntyre 1993; Loughran 1999). The categories of teachers’ professional knowledge identified in Figure 1.1 are based on the widely-used typology proposed by Shulman (1986, 1987). Many of these categories consist of both explicit (or declarative) knowledge – things a person could tell you that they know – and tacit knowledge, which cannot be fully expressed in words but is implicit in actions.

Teachers’ professional knowledge comes from a variety of sources. Some of the more important ones are shown on the right-hand side of Figure 1.1. These are not, of course, as separate or distinct as this might seem to imply. For example, whilst a teacher may have direct knowledge of a specific research finding, the influence of research on his or her thinking may also be indirect. For instance, a teaching session in an initial or in-service teacher education programme might have been based on a specific research finding, or a general perspective that comes from research, as might the treatment of a topic in a textbook or a teaching resource. These may then influence a teacher’s knowledge and

Figure 1.1 Influences on teachers’ decision making

ideas, even though he or she may not recognise or acknowledge any specific research input. The dotted arrows on th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Series editor's preface
• Preface
• Part I What is the issue?
• Part II What does the research tell us?
• Part III What are the overall implications?
• Appendix Outline summaries of the four projects undertaken by the Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) Research Network
• References
• Index