Month: March 2022

Breaking the fourth wall: evidence communication inside policy organisations

evidencepolicyblogLeave a comment

Christiane Gerblinger

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Peep show: a framework for watching how evidence is communicated inside policy organisations’.

Seeing how governments formulate decisions is a crucial component of their ability to claim democratic legitimacy. This includes being seen to draw on the knowledge and evidence produced by their civil service policy advisers. Yet much of the advice provided to governments is being increasingly withdrawn from public accessibility.

With governments likely to benefit from a status quo that normalises withdrawal of policy processes and rationales from public view, it is important to find alternative ways to illuminate how policy officials communicate their evidence and how that evidence is used in political contexts by governments to make decisions on our behalf.

Continue reading →

In the age of evidence-based decision-making, where can education decision makers really turn for evidence?

evidencepolicyblogLeave a comment

Fiona Hollands and Venita Holmes

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Comparing evidence on the effectiveness of reading resources from expert ratings, practitioner judgements, and research repositories’.

In 2017–2018, a large school district in the U.S. was threatened by the state education agency with closure of 23 struggling elementary schools unless it could improve students’ performance on state-mandated assessments. The district’s Office of Elementary Curriculum and Development immediately tried to determine which reading resources (reading programmes, assessments, online tools, book collections, and professional development supports) were available at each school and to assess their effectiveness at improving student reading proficiency. To help with this evaluation task, our research-practice team explored various options for quickly providing suitable evidence on the effectiveness of each of 23 reading resources used at one or more of these schools. We expected to find reasonable consistency across multiple sources of information that we could use to help guide the district’s actions. The results were not quite as expected.

Continue reading →