Envisioning a coherent evidence ecosystem for education in a digital society: global and local evidence synthesis, mobilisation, and generation.

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Introduction
The Evidence for Education Network (EEN) is a global partnership of evidence functions dedicated to addressing the education equity gap. The network aims to improve teaching and learning through better use of evidence. Network members share a commitment to:
 Accelerate the volume, quality, and use of evidence to improve teaching and learning.
 Support education equity in our systems and around the world.
The value of taking a network-based approach to this work lies in the ability to collaborate on building a sustainable global evidence ecosystem that positions evidence in education as a “global good”, while, at the same time, recognising the pivotal role that local, contextual knowledge plays in ensuring effective evidence implementation and use.

Summarising the global and local evidence base in education
Effective evidence needs to be able to quickly answer the questions that matter to policymakers and practitioners. Evidence functions are called upon to build momentum in strengthening domestic evidence-support systems, enhance the global evidence architecture, and put evidence at the centre of everyday life (Global Evidence Commission, 2023).
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, there has been an explosion of available evidence, facilitating instant access to thousands of “research” results (Burns, 2024). This prompts us to define what we mean by research evidence – in this case, the product of any study that follows a systematic process for collecting and analysing information. Next, there is the challenge of summarising available evidence: examining an evidence base comprehensively takes a long time, but choosing to look at a small number of studies introduces bias. The EEN is working to overcome these challenges by:
 Upholding shared standards of evidence.
 Contributing to a shared infrastructure for living evidence reviews, automating where possible, to reduce duplication, and therefore save time and cost.
Evidence review work in education is often duplicative: review teams extract information from studies that then sit on individual computers, as new review teams waste their time extracting the same information from the same studies. One of the core principles behind the collaboration in the EEN is building from a shared evidence base. Over 3500 studies with information on context, methodology and outcomes underpin the “global” evidence in the Teaching and Learning Toolkit. Network members then add local studies to understand contextual variation and implementation. When EEN members add additional topics to the Toolkit or conduct other reviews, they add to the central evidence database – reducing duplication. The aspiration is for this type of collaboration to expand to other organisations conducting evidence reviews. While many outputs may be produced by different organisations for different audiences or purposes, collating and sharing the data from studies will make all evidence synthesis in education more efficient.
Alongside collaboration, this work can be made more efficient with automation. The EEN currently works with the EPPI-Centre at UCL to fund development work on automating elements of the systematic review process utilising artificial intelligence.
The aspiration is to have a central living database that does not just contain citation details of studies, but all the information required to quickly synthesise and understand outcomes and implementation challenges for policymakers and practitioners.

Mobilising evidence at the local level through national brokerage functions
Translating evidence from a website into real change in the classroom is difficult (EEF, 2017) – availability, and even engagement with high-quality research evidence – while valuable – is not enough to ensure high quality application (Burns and Schuller, 2022). This is brought into sharper focus when considering the balance between the availability, and varying quality, of ‘research results’ at the fingertips of those that have digital access, contrasted against those that do not. Even when digital access is not a barrier, academic research sitting behind paywalls is a further accessibility concern. We need to do more if we want to support policy and practice to access research evidence and use it well.
If evidence-use is going to be responsive to the needs of policy and practice, we need to answer the question “where do people get evidence?”. Establishing independent evidence functions is one way for systems to broker evidence into policy or practice through coordinating, synthesising, and mobilising the evidence that already exists. Across many systems, there are numerous different possible educational actors that could influence research engagement and use (Mouthaan and Revai, 2023). It is necessary to support active mobilisation of this research evidence, and capacity-building strategies that support evidence-use, to ensure that policy and practice not only access an evidence base, but that it is clear, relevant, and they know how to action it. This is especially critical in conflict-affected contexts with intersecting, complex challenges like large class sizes, high numbers of internally displaced people and refugee children, and limited access to teacher professional development opportunities. In these cases, it becomes even more difficult for teachers and leaders to engage with research evidence to improve outcomes.
EEN members are nationally- or regionally focused evidence functions with deep understanding of the social, political, and economic systems in which they operate. This allows partners to develop contextually sensitive evidence-use strategies that take into consideration the numerous other influences on policymakers’ and practitioners’ behaviours, and work with-not against- the wider system.

Session structure
This panel session will be moderated by EEF and will take the audience through the EEN members’ journey towards marrying a comprehensive global database with local exemplification and mobilisation.
 SUMMA will explore the ways in which their ‘Open’ platform, which houses contextually sensitive pedagogical resources, can influence teaching practices across Latin America to improve student outcomes.
 eBASE Africa will share their mobilisation approach ‘Pedagogic Audits and Feedback’, that aims to get readily available evidence into the hands of practitioners, identifying barriers to and strategies for improving evidence literacy in the profession.
 Queen Rania Foundation will share learnings from piloting a Parental Engagement Guide in Jordan, focused on bridging the digital divide through the provision of mixed, digital, and non-digital resources, tools, and channels.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Jonathan Kay, Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)

Individual Presentations

• Bridging the Digital Divide: Learnings from piloting the ‘Schools’ Guide for Parental Engagement’ in Jordan - Sandy Qarmout, Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development

• Pedagogic Audits and Feedback - Rigobert Hanny Pambe Miong, eBASE Africa

Discussants

• Sandy Qarmout, Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development

• Rigobert Hanny Pambe Miong, eBASE Africa

• Dante Castillo-Canales, SUMMA