Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
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A New Push for Science in Education in Britain

3/26/2013

 
Ben Goldacre is a British physician and academic, and is the author of Bad Science, an expose of bad medical practice that is based on wrong-headed science.  For the last decade he has written a terrific column by the same name for the Guardian.

Goldacre has recently turned his critical scientific eye to educational practices in Britain. He was asked by the British Department for Education to comment on the use of scientific data in education and on the current state of affairs in Britain. You can download the report here.

So what does Goldacre say?

He offers an analogy of education to medicine; the former can benefit from the application of scientific methods, just as the latter has.

Goldacre touts the potential of randomised controlled trails (RCTs). You take a group of students and administer an intervention (a new instructional method for long division, say) to one group and not to another. Then you see how each group of students did.

Goldacre also speculates on what institutions would need to do to make the British education system as a whole more research-minded. He names two significant changes;
  • There would need to be an institution that communicates the findings of scientific research (similar to the American "What Works Clearinghouse.")
  • British teachers would need a better appreciation for scientific research so that they would understand why a particular practice was touted as superior, and could evaluate themselves the evidence for the claim
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I'm a booster of science in education
As someone who has written shorter and book-length treatments of the role that scientific research might play in education, I'm very excited that Goldacre has made this thoughtful and spirited contribution.

I offer no criticisms of what Goldacre suggests, but would like to add three points.

First, I agree with Goldacre that randomized trials allow the strongest conclusions. But I don't think that we should emphasize RCTs to the exclusion of all other sources of data. After all, if we continue with Goldacre's analogy to medicine, I think he would agree that epidemiology has proven useful.

As a matter of tactics, note that the What Works Clearinghouse emphasized RCTs to the near exclusion of all other types of evidence, and that came to be seen as a problem. If you exclude other types of studies the available data will likely be thin. RCTs are simply hard to pull off: they are expensive, they require permission from lots of people. Hence, the What Works Clearinghouse ended up being agnostic about many interventions--"no randomized controlled trials yet." Its impact has been minimal.

Other sources of data can be useful; smaller scale studies, and especially, basic scientific work that bears on the underpinnings of an intervention.

We must also remember that each RCT--strictly interpreted--offers pretty narrow information: method A is better than method B (for these kids, as implemented by these teachers, etc.) Allowing other sources of data in the picture potentially offers a richer interpretation.

As a simple example, shouldn't laboratory studies showing the importance of phonemic awareness influence our interpretation of RCTs in preschool interventions that teach phonemic awareness skills?

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Second, basic scientific knowledge gleaned from cognitive and developmental psychology (and other fields) can not only help us to interpret the results of randomized trials, that knowledge can be useful to teachers on its own. Just as a physician uses her knowledge of human physiology to diagnose a case, a teacher can use her knowledge of cognition to "diagnose" how to best teach a particular concept to a particular child.

I don't know about Britain, but this information is not taught in most American schools of Education. I wrote a book about cognitive principles that might apply to education. The most common remark I hear from teachers is surprise (and often, anger) that they were not taught these principles when they trained.

Elsewhere I've suggested we need not just a "what works" clearinghouse to evaluate interventions, but a "what's known" clearinghouse for basic scientific knowledge that might apply to education.

Third, I'm uneasy about the medicine analogy. It too easily leads to the perception that science aims to prescribe what teachers must do, that science will identify one set of "best practices" which all must follow. Goldacre makes clear on the very first page of the report that's NOT what he's suggesting, but to the non-doctors among us, we see medicine this way: I go to my doctor, she diagnoses what's wrong, and there is a standard way (established by scientific method) to treat the disease.

That perception may be in error, but I think it's common.

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I've suggested a different analogy: architecture. When building a house an architect must respect certain basic facts set out by science. Physics and materials science will loom large for the architect; for educators it might be psychology, sociology et al. The rules represent limiting conditions, but so long as you stay within those boundaries there is lots of ways to get it right. Just as physics doesn't tell the architect what the house must look like, so too cognitive psychology doesn't tell teachers how they must teach.

RCTs play a different role. They provide proof that a standard solution to a common problem is useful. For example, architects routinely face the problem of ensuring that a wall doesn't collapse when a large window is placed in it, and there are standard solutions to this problem. Likewise, educators face common problems, and RCTs hold the promise of providing proven solutions. Just as the architect doesn't have to use any of the standard methods, the teacher needn't use a method proven by an RCT. But the architect needs be sure that the wall stays up, and the teacher needs to be sure that the child learns.

I made one of my garage-band-quality videos on this topic.

There's more to this topic--what it will mean to train teachers to evaluate scientific evidence, the role of schools of education. Indeed, there's more in Goldacre's report and I urge you to read it. Longer term, I urge you to consider why we wouldn't want better use of science in educational practice.

Chris
3/26/2013 04:00:03 am

I strongly support the goal of your blog and your writing in general. There is a book making the rounds among education and nonprofit leaders here in Minnesota (and elsewhere?) called How Children Succeed by Paul Tough. Apparently it contains a fair amount of research and It seems to be influencing the conversation around policy and funding for education and youth programs. Might I suggest as a future book review? Thank you.

Dan Willingham
3/26/2013 06:37:54 am

Thanks Chris. I haven't read Tough's book yet, but it's on my list. . .

EducationState link
3/26/2013 05:52:48 am

The main issue here is whether RCTs are better than what goes on already in the classroom.

We could conduct an RCT to find this out i.e. compare an RCT with a non-RCT method. However, this would seem to present a problem of circularity (or bootstrapping), as the supposedly best method (i.e. RCTs) cannot be used to evaluate itself.

We then need another method to judge between RCTs and other methods, reasons etc., but that is self-defeating because if, for example, we used evidence to make this judgement of what is best, this is an argument for the use of evidence, not for the use of RCTs.

Of course, the evidence could be derived by an RCT but we then seem to face the bootstrapping problem again.

The question then whether RCTs are better or not seems one that cannot be resolved, unless of course such concerns of circularity, and being self-defeating are side-stepped!

Btw Daniel, if you can, please read (and comment) on:

'What makes Daniel Willingham a scientist': http://www.educationstate.org/2013/03/03/daniel-willingham-scientist/

Nema
3/26/2013 11:06:37 am

What do you think about using a civil engineering analogy? After an architect designs a beautiful, usable, creative, or innovative public edifice, a civil engineer makes sure the design won't hurt anyone. Who would or should play the civil engineer role in education?

Leon Cych link
3/26/2013 10:13:02 pm

Totally agree about what's known? So where is the equivalent? One place they are building this is the EFF In the UK http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ - anyone got any SPECIFIC pointers to any others around the globe?

Tom Sundstrom link
3/27/2013 06:19:34 am

I agree with your analogy preference. Medicine is restorative with significant effort focused on diagnosing the problem. Architecture is constructive with significant effort focused on design and development for a purpose.

Looking further at the analogies, one significant problem I see in education is the lack of the Architect’s primary tool – AutoCAD. Another problem is the lack of clearly cataloged knowledge and skill content definitions. Where’s the master foundational reference for education? Medicine has the human genome. Architects have the periodic table of elements with extensions to man-made construction materials. Given the valuable RCT information, where is the indexed, searchable database for easy educator reference?


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