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Need for evidence-based policy making in education

23 September 2013

I've recently posted something on Google plus where I argued that the sources behind educational policy making should contain at least some degree of data. In our day and age, it would be naive to think that policy making can be entirely based on data for at least a few reasons:

  1. Studies have shown over and again that educational policy making is primarily driven by personal interests of those in the top ranks of each national government.
  2. We simply don't have enough data, experimental or observational, to cover all the data needs to create evidence-based policy.
  3. To think of data as something objective and interest-free is highly misguided. The very act of designing a data collection or experiment already contains an intention to demonstrate a few things and hide others

With these three points out of the way, I would argue that collecting some data using reproducible standards is at least something that can be criticized, while a mere opinion based on vested interests is hard to dissect. For example, if your data was collected in a reproducible manner I can criticize whatever aspect of it and try to do better, but if a politician simply states that something has to be done in a certain way because that's the right thing to do. The latter can't be argued about since the person who stated it is the most powerful stakeholder in the decision making process.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.