Data and schools
In this post I talk about educational research and how it’s used in school policy. I sort of ramble about a bit, but quite liked the process of writing it whilst the exploring sources at the same time! In recent weeks I’ve been enjoying being part of a teacher researcher group that we have setup at school. In the group we’ve talked about what we’re interested in and thought about the theme of autonomy in a bit of detail. More generally, we’ve discussed what constitutes good evidence in educational research with a common thread being that it’s important to look critically at studies that appeal to big data. This is prevalent in the educational research that informs practice in schools and arguably with good reason, as drawing from large meta-analyses can be seen as a ‘best bet’ when schools have limited means to conduct their own research and draw their own conclusions. But in this post, I’m going to first make the case that we need to be cautious about accepting large-scale quantitativ...