systematic review of personal development planning; and theory to practice gaps.
The advocacy of evidence-based practice is currently being used to undermine
professional autonomy and to valorise the“gold standard”of randomized controlled
trials. However, the paper proposes that evidence can properly be claimed for
critique and emancipatory projects, and that its current discursive location at the
core of New Labour thinking is not the only one available.
Biesta (2007) provides a critical analysis of the idea of evidence-based practice
and the ways in which it has been promoted and implemented in thefield of
education, focusing on the tension between scientific and democratic control over
educational practice and research. He examines three key assumptions of
evidence-based education:first, the extent to which educational practice can be
compared to the practice of medicine, thefield in which evidence-based practice
wasfirst developed; second, the role of knowledge in professional actions, with
special attention to what kind of epistemology is appropriate for professional
practices that wish to be informed by research; and third, the expectations about the
practical role of research implicit in the idea of evidence-based education.
Evidence-based practice provides a framework for understanding the role of
research in educational practice that not only restricts the scope of decision-making
to questions about effectivity and effectiveness, but that also restricts the opportu-
nities for participation in educational decision-making. He argues that we must
expand our views about the interrelations among research, policy and practice, to
keep in view education as a thoroughly moral and political practice that requires
continuous democratic contestation and deliberation.
References
Biesta, G. (2007). Why“what works”won’t work: Evidence-based practice and the democratic
deficit in educational research.Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–21.
Bridges, D., Smeyers, P., & Smith, R. D. (Eds.) (2009)Evidence based educational policy: What
evidence? What basis? Whose policy?Oxford, United Kingdom: Wiley Blackwell.
Clegg, S. (2005). Evidence-based practice in educational research: A critical realist critique of
systematic review.British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(3), 415–428.
Davies, B. (2003). Death to critique and dissent? The policies and practices of new managerialism
and of‘evidence-based practice’.Gender and Education, 15(1), 91–103.
Peters, M. A. & Tesar, M. (2016) Bad research, bad education: The contested evidence for
evidence-based research, policy and practice in education.
Kelly, T. (2014, Fall).“Evidence”. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.),The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
URL =http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/evidence/
540 Part VI: Research, Institutional Evaluation and Evidence-Based Research