Improving Education Through Research? From Effectiveness, Causality, and Technology to Purpose, Complexity, and Culture

• In Event: Research and the Promise of Educational Improvement: International Perspectives on a Vexed Question

Abstract

This paper provides an exploration of a three enduring assumptions in the discussion about the role of research in the improvement of educational practice: the suggestion that research should focus on increasing the effectiveness of education; the suggestion that research should identify factors that, if implemented, can effect change; and the suggestion that in doing so research needs to generate technical or technological knowledge. The paper discusses each of these assumptions in detail, and uses a concrete case – the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme, a major ten year concerted effort to improve the quality and significance of educational research in the UK – to, on the one hand show how these assumptions do indeed provide a common sense notion of what research should achieve in relation to the improvement of education and, on the other hand, to show the problems and limitations of these assumptions. For this the paper specifically looks at the "10 principles for effective pedagogy" that were formulated on the basis of a review of most of the research conducted within the Teaching and Learning Research Programme over its time span. With regard to the first assumption, I argue that attempts to increase the effectiveness of educational practice are futile if there is no sense of what education should be effective for. I show that an awareness of the question of purpose is lacking in the 10 principles, and make a case, using insights from educational theory, for a particular understanding of the question of purpose in education, namely as a multi-dimensional question. The ideas here is that education always has ambitions in a number of different domains – such as the acquisition of knowledge and skills; the initiation in traditions; the formation of critical autonomy – and that such ambitions are not necessarily in balance but often create tensions that cannot be resolved by more research but rather require value-based judgement. With regard to the second assumption I question the appropriateness of causal and quasi-causal assumptions in relation to the understanding of how education 'works.' Rather than to think of the 'workings' of education in terms of causes and effects – which lies behind the search for 'factors' and their 'impact' – I turn to complexity theory in order to argue for a different ontology of education, one that sees education as a open, recursive and semiotic system. Such a view provides a very different approach to the question how educational change might be effected – one that gives a prominent place to ways of meaning making of the actors within education (most notably teachers and students). This provides the background for the final point of this paper, which is to argue that rather than to focus on the production and provision of technical knowledge, much educational improvement takes place through changing interpretations and perceptions. There is, therefore, also an important role for what cultural forms of knowledge in relation to the challenge of of educational improvement.

Author

• Gert J. Biesta, Brunel University London