Why and how teachers should make use of research evidence

Michelle Judkins, Oliver Stacey, Tami McCrone & Matthew Inniss

Research Summary

The National Foundation for Educational Research set out to explore evidence-based practice in schools: how teachers use evidence in the classroom, and what they feel are the most effective approaches to engaging with research and using it to inform their practice. Clear benefits were found, including getting teachers thinking about their teaching, giving teachers new ideas, boosting confidence, stimulating professional discussion and breaking down subject barriers.

Researchers

Michelle Judkins, Oliver Stacey, Tami McCrone & Matthew Inniss

Research Institution

National Foundation for Educational Research

What is this about?

The key questions were:

1. What makes for an evidence-informed school?
2. How do teachers use research evidence in the classroom?
3. What do they feel are the most effective approaches to engaging with research and using it to inform their practice?

What was done?

The data were collected through 17 telephone interviews with members of the senior leadership teams (SLT) within a sample of United Learning schools; and 39 face-to-face interviews with teachers from seven case-study schools. United Learning is a group of schools committed to evidence-based practice.

Main findings and outputs

• Overall, engaging in research evidence was perceived to encourage teacher reflection and open-mindedness.
• Teachers’ openness to adopting different approaches was considered to make lessons more engaging for learners, and engaging with research was seen to encourage this: ‘Using research evidence can give you new ideas; it helps to stop you getting stale and using the same teaching strategies over and over again . . .’ .
• Interviewees also believed that teachers benefit from research evidence through its use to inform professional development and through the confidence acquired from implementing new approaches: ‘research provides evidence that a teaching strategy is effective. This in turn gives you more confidence to try out something new in the classroom and to take a risk’.
• SLT members explained the benefits of using research evidence in terms of its ability to drive school improvement initiatives; to substantiate the reasons behind change; and to underpin staff professional development: ‘[Engaging in research evidence] provides a process for thought and examination of practice. It opens minds ….. and prevents teachers becoming compartmentalized within their own subject areas’ .

Recommendations:

•  Be open-minded when drawing on research evidence to shape teaching – teachers need the confidence to fail and try again, learning from the experience.
• Create time e.g. in department meetings to read and discuss research.
• Make research findings accessible.

Relevance to RE

RE teachers might adopt these findings into their practice, as research-based ways to develop teaching and learning. RE-related research has been made accessible via this website, for instance. A department or other group of RE teachers might select one of its research reports as the basis for a meeting, discuss the report in the meeting, devise some follow-up teaching activities aimed at putting the findings into practice and then report back in a future meeting.

Generalisability and potential limitations

The researchers say that evidence-based practice in school is in its infancy, and recommend building on their study with further research in schools. The scale of their study is fairly small but does show that within one group of schools, teachers and others are finding that the use of research evidence helps generate improvements to teaching and overall culture.

Find out more

The report is: Teachers’ Use of Research Evidence: A case study of United Learning schools. It can be accessed freely at https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/IMUL01/IMUL01.pdf