What’s not to like about RCTs in education?

Gale, Trevor

doi:10.4324/9781315160320-12

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…As Gale (2017) notes, ‘because randomised controlled trials (RCTs) see no difference between physical and social worlds, or [they] regard the social world as operating in the same way as the physical world, they tend to search for the same kinds of knowledge they imagine to exist in the physical world’ (p. 220). Policy and practice-oriented ‘clearinghouses’ have become increasingly popular, promoting research studies on various social interventions and commonly positioning RCT methodologies as the ‘gold standard’ approach to producing evidence.…”

Section: Access and Equity Policy And Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Drawing on recent theory about the problems with governmental desires for specific program evaluation approaches (Burke and Lumb, 2018; Gale, 2017; Morrison and van der Werf, 2018), we argue that conceptual distancing from the programs and participants will increase if objectifying methodologies continue to be prioritised at the expense of those that enable understanding of participant experiences and values. We also explain that if a decontextualising approach to tendering is introduced for providers to apply for capped places for enabling (access) programs, the purpose and impact of the programs could be compromised.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Policy misrecognitions and paradoxes: Developing more contextually attuned access and equity policies in Australian higher education

Bennett

Lumb

2019

Policy Futures in Education

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In this paper we discuss recent policy attempts (in 2017) to introduce new frameworks for Australian higher education access and equity programs. These include introducing fees and a tendering process for access or ‘enabling’ programs, as they are called in Australia, and an evaluation framework based on an evidence hierarchy for widening participation or ‘equity’ programs. We illuminate how those policymaking attempts contradict the conditions required for equity-oriented programs because they misrecognise the experiences of the participants. We argue that different conceptual approaches to provision and evaluation are required for practitioners, providers and policymakers to shape future policy together ( Heimans and Singh, 2018 ) so that enabling and equity programs can be understood in ways that value the knowledges and experiences of the participants involved ( Sayer, 2011 ). Our aim is to contribute to work that disrupts the positioning of ‘objective’ policy evaluation frameworks vs ‘subjective’ practices because this decontextualises ( Burke and Lumb, 2018 ) and oversimplifies ( Tesar, 2016a ), and may serve paradoxically to reduce the programs’ impacts.

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Section: Access and Equity Policy And Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Policy misrecognitions and paradoxes: Developing more contextually attuned access and equity policies in Australian higher education

Bennett

Lumb

2019

Policy Futures in Education

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“…For some who publically advocate EIP in education, a version of the normative version of practice seems at first glance closest to their view of educational practice, as a clear purpose to practice seems important, but this normative vision is not characterised by mutual accountability or practitioners' participation in the definition and management of the practice. Instead, it rests upon a preconceived vision of what educational practice should involve, and arguably also a preconceived notion of the purpose of education that may exclude important educational purposes [7,26,30]. The norms and purposes of the practice are set outwith the practice, and thus practice communities are disempowered, losing their capacity for change and adaptation.…”

Section: How Could and Should Practice Be Organised?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While many of the aims of the EEF may be laudable, the consequence is a deprofessionalisation of teaching. While being 'evidence-informed' may have value as part of 'teacher professionalism' [36] (p. 11), the benefits for professional autonomy and for education more generally only accrue if teachers have greater control both over their practice community and over their knowledge base-they must be able to exercise reflexively objective judgement in regards to the evidence and understand its provenance [30,37]. Arguably, this can only be done as part of a shared practice, together with higher education practitioners.…”

Section: How Could and Should Practice Be Organised?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge, Evidence, and the Configuration of Educational Practice

Hordern

2019

Education Sciences

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This paper examines the context of evidence-informed practice (EIP) by inquiring into how educational practice is defined and organised, and how predominant understandings of educational practice are concomitant with preferences for particular forms of evidence. This leads to discussion of how certain educational research traditions speak (or are unable to speak) to these evidence requirements, and how this shapes the nature of EIP. While the rise of EIP can be understood as part of the increasing attention paid by governments to systemic ‘improvement’ in education systems, it can be argued that the lack of a coherent body of educational knowledge in many national traditions enables governments to exercise control not only of definitions of ‘what works’ in education but also over conceptualisations of educational practice. For some policy makers and practitioners, the much-remarked dislocation between ‘evidence’ and teaching practice in many national contexts can only be solved by a narrowing of what counts as knowledge alongside a more prescriptive control over what counts as acceptable educational judgement. However, such an alignment serves to exclude wider educational purposes and arguably instrumentalises pedagogical relations. Meanwhile, some continental European countries maintain traditions that may serve to mitigate such developments, although these traditions are not without challenge.

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“…The government and many academics have given RCTs a prominent position, however, the appropriateness of such an approach to evaluate complex social programmes needs to be considered. The suitability and challenges of applying the RCT approach in educational research has been well articulated by Gales (). Gales criticises the RCTs discourse when applied to education research, which treats students as if they were taking part in a medical trial by adopting terms such as ‘control’, ‘experimental’ and ‘treatment’.…”

Section: Evaluating Outreach: the Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the impact of the Academic Enrichment Programme on widening access to selective universities: Application of the Theory of Change framework

Barkat

2019

British Educational Res J

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Evaluating the impact of widening participation interventions can be challenging. This article discusses some of the difficulties in attributing change to complex widening participation interventions and suggests that the Theory of Change (ToC) approach can address some of these challenges by evidencing the contribution interventions have made to observed outcomes and longer‐term impact. This article sets out the application of a ToC approach as a framework to plan and design the evaluation of the Academic Enrichment Programme (AEP) at the University of Birmingham, which aims to support under‐represented students secure places at selective universities. The evaluation sought to explore the extent to which the programme impacted on students’ academic aspirations, motivation, attainment and progression to selective universities. It presents the findings of the evaluation, which combined the ToC with a mixed methods longitudinal design spanning six cohorts of students. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected to track students’ progress across their engagement with the programme and into higher education. The results suggest that the ToC programme was largely verified. The AEP seems to promote academic attainment, with AEP students outperforming national and regional benchmarks. The AEP also appears to increase entry rates to Russell Group universities for disadvantaged students, however, the effect seems to be greater when combined with alternative offers. This article demonstrates the value of the ToC approach in strengthening both the evaluation design and the contribution claims of the observed results to the widening participation intervention.

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What’s not to like about RCTs in education?

Cited by 10 publications

References 20 publications

Policy misrecognitions and paradoxes: Developing more contextually attuned access and equity policies in Australian higher education

Policy misrecognitions and paradoxes: Developing more contextually attuned access and equity policies in Australian higher education

Knowledge, Evidence, and the Configuration of Educational Practice

Evaluating the impact of the Academic Enrichment Programme on widening access to selective universities: Application of the Theory of Change framework

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