Part VI
Research, Institutional Evaluation and
Evidence-Based Research
Introduction
Education as a discipline is bedevilled by a series dualisms that makes life difficult:
between theory and practice, research and policy, and research and practice. These
dualism characterize most practice-oriented disciplines and demand careful analysis
for even to list these“gaps”is not to identify their true nature which shifts
according to the development of the discipline, the progress of science in general
and the current interpretations proposed for“theory”,“research”, and“practice”.
The dualisms impact on“effectiveness”,“efficiency”, and“achievement”and are
also driven by larger theoretical development in evaluation theory. One notable
tendency has been the growth of the assessment and evaluation industries that have
passed out of the public domain into the hands of private sector that increasingly
make available technology-enabled systems and formats driven by data and
recently by“big data”and“analytics”.
One is tempted to argue that the technology-enabled development of evaluation
that is used for assessing institutional or individual performance coincided with the
rise of the accountability movement in the policy realm and neoliberalism more
generally that demands“value for money”and insist on regular and ongoing audits.
Tracey Burns and Tom Schuller (2007) from OECD Centre for Educational
Research and Innovation, write of“the (re)emergence of‘evidence’”in the form of
evidence-informed policy research (EIPR) which they trace back to the growing
recognition of the economic importance of education in knowledge-based econo-
mies, the concern with accountability in respect of educational expenditures and a
concern about the quality and effectiveness of current educational research (p. 16).
Their work explores the issues underlying the use of evidence in educational
policy-making discussing what constitutes evidence for research in education in an
attempt to link research and policy.
Of course what Burns and Schuller are presenting as“evidence”is a historically
conditioned notion that is framed as a result of certain models of evidence and a
view of what should constitute the relationship between research and policy. This is
not the place to enter into a discussion of the philosophy of evidence except to say