What research can best guide teaching? One current dominant answer to this question is that we need to ‘scientise’ educational research to find out what is guaranteed to work anywhere, Professsor of Science Interdisciplinary Educational Research at Deakin University Vaughan Prain writes.
According to this agenda, we need our own and others’ expertise in big data analysis of past studies to identify effective teaching strategies and advise teachers on how to optimise learning. Educational systems and technology companies now seem to agree that this is the only way forward. While this drive for evidence based advice is laudable, I want to raise some concerns about this agenda, its assumptions and methods, and propose a more modest approach. More than 10 years ago, Gert Biesta (2007) identified many compelling arguments against this scientised evidence based search for ‘what works’. Here I briefly cover four of his points: Education is not ‘an intervention or treatment’ and cannot be separated from questions of what is ultimately desirable individually and collectively for participants. Education is about values rather than technocratic solutions to predetermined goals. Educational research tells us what worked somewhere in the past, but not what will work everywhere in future. Curricular content and methods keep changing, making past insights (the rear vision mirror of big data analyses) only part of the evidence needed. Education is about teachers making judgments about desirable outcomes in particular situations. Therefore education research can inform and enrich educational practice and policy,
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but not dictate what should happen. To pick up on the second point, picture the following lesson sequence undertaken by a Year 8 class in Sydney last year. In a STEM project, students were invited to work on a project about setting up a colony on Mars, where they worked with their technology teacher on rocket design, their science teacher on nose cone materials, and their mathematics teacher on inventing a calendar system for use on Mars. One student designed an interplanetary communication strategy based on the travel time of light between Mars and Earth at different points in their orbit. As this example suggests, a modern curriculum is a moving target, and therefore not easily amenable to ‘fixed’ past solutions and prescriptions for methods for success. Another problem is the issue of what is hard or easy to scientise in educational research, and therefore what gets foregrounded or neglected in this agenda. Andrews and colleagues (2014), noted that current standardised tests measure a narrow range of learning goals, ignoring other educational objectives, such as physical, moral, civic and artistic development, and the need to prepare students to participate in democratic self government, moral action and a life of personal development, growth and wellbeing. The upshot is that in casting teaching as mainly a technical capability that can be neatly prescribed from past studies,