Thinking across boundaries: Building rigour and nuance in education research and evaluation through interdisciplinary research.

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Formal Panel Session: Evidence-based decision making in education: asking the right questions, finding the right evidence

Proposal

Interdisciplinary training pedagogies are almost unquestioned in primary and secondary education in modern Europe. Within interdisciplinary training pedagogies children are encouraged to apply insights from several established disciplines or traditional fields of study to solve large and complex problems that can only be understood by combining the perspectives of two or more fields of study. Interdisciplinary approaches have been scaled across modern European classrooms in the past decade to ensure the next generation is equipped to respond to an ever-changing and complex world.

In the development sector, while a variety of theoretical perspectives have shaped the study of development itself (ranging from economics, history, political science, philosophy, sociology, human geography to anthropology), very little applied interdisciplinary work actually takes place. Yet, increasing access to quality education outcomes is one of the largest and most complex problems facing our modern world. This qualifies the problem as precisely the circumstances under which interdisciplinary research is required.

There is ample literature documenting the barriers to interdisciplinary research, predominantly from the perspective of the higher education sector. Examples include attitudinal resistance, communication barriers, differing conceptions of ‘rigour’, differing research methods and institutional and career barriers (Pellmar TC, Eisenberg L,, 2000). In this paper, we focus on the advantages of combining perspectives from two or more fields of study to the complex issues faced in education and development research and evaluation. Specifically, we argue that applying interdisciplinary perspectives provides a more nuanced and robust evidence base.

Within this session, we present representative data from a DFID-funded study on the learning outcomes of public and private school students in Lagos, Nigeria (Data collected as part of Outhred, Binci, Lipcan and Bahri, 2016). Investigating a key claim: “Low-cost private education produces superior English language proficiency outcomes”, we interpret quantitative findings using (1) an education production-function model perspective, (2) evidence on first and second language acquisition from the field of linguistics and (3) educational theory.

We find that the combination of applying three disciplinary perspectives on the same evidence provides a more nuanced and robust response than any one discipline in isolation. The authors make the argument that interdisciplinary research can produce evidence that is greater than the sum of its (disciplinary) parts.

Authors

• Rachel Outhred, Oxford University, Senior Education Researcher

• Alina Lipcan, Oxford Policy Management