What does it mean to say a program is evidence based? How much can we trust the research that is supplied (or funded) by companies in support of their products? How can we know a particular program is effective?
Monday, February 6, 2012
Spring 2012: Blog Post #2
In an era of accountability and transparency in public education, text book publishers, curriculum writers and test developers have made a lot of money with claims that their prepackaged curriculum guides and test-prep programs are "evidence based." As we have seen in this week's readings, the term "evidence based" can be misleading. And, truth be told, many of these aforementioned curriculum programs will be in use when you arrive at your first job as a teacher.
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In theory, evidence-based programs are founded on unbiased research that is thoroughly tested in a variety of different settings. Unfortunately, this is often very difficult in the field of education. It is usually difficult to find large enough groups to make the findings significant and even more difficult to ensure all participants are tested/evaluated in the same way.
Because of the expenses of large studies, most of the research is funded by companies that will use the findings to support their products. It's hard to trust these findings because if results didn't support the products, they would probably be left unpublished.
To find if a program is effective, teachers should look for similar studies done by a variety of sources... but the best way to find if a program is effective is to try it in your own classroom and find out :)
It's hard to say that anything is truly evidence based. As we saw on Monday, although there are claims made that something is supported by evidence and research, we must be careful as to who did the research/funded the research. Some things like claiming that nutrition directly affects studies is fully supported by much research done, however, many times this is not the case. By carefully researching the research (not to sound ironic), we can examine to what extent the sources and evidences are effective for us to use.
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