Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
Audio Clip 6:
An interview with Meredith Honig and Cynthia Coburn
Which evidence? And who decides?
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TRANSCRIPT:
MH: What's needed in the next wave of work on this is more of a systemic conceptualization of evidence use. In the first wave we had a general call for evidence use. And now we really need to think through, who decides what. And which evidence should be used at which levels.
I think that it's a really interesting puzzle when the federal government, for example, requires that everyone use evidence. Because then, essentially it's not clear who is supposed to use which evidence for which decisions. If schools are also making data driven decisions, what is an appropriate role for a central office in that kind of system?
CC: Because when you talk about using evidence to make decisions, one of the things that you're not paying attention to, or what's implicit, is that there are issues of authority involved. You need the authority to make a decision.
MH: And I think the important thing to keep in mind when you're looking at a district and asking, "is this effective," or "is this working," it's important to keep in mind that it's difficult to grapple with research findings that may be, are, in conflict with one another. It's difficult to manage the volume of information that Cynthia talked about earlier. It's difficult to establish the relationship you need to have with schools to get meaningful information, to establish relationships with universities and others who might have information you want.
And I also think it's tricky to wade through the current policy messages about using research, to wade through those messages themselves. One the one hand, the messages are saying to central offices, "use a whole host of information in your decision making." But on the other hand they're saying, "no, use this information in your decision making. Use this information about what works. Use test scores that are aggregated or compiled in this way." And I think that over time central offices themselves are going to be the ones who have to become better consumers of all of those messages.
The real challenges for central office administrators the becomes, how to sort through, not just evaluation data on a particular program, but to combine that with a whole host of other sources of information about student performance and their own local political and other situations.
