Revisiting the Role of Values in Evidence-based Education

Abstract

Evidence-based practice in education involves basing decisions about what to do on evidence about the relative effectiveness of available interventions (e.g. programmes, products, practices). This paper considers two influential critiques of evidence-based education (EBE) pertaining to its treatment of values. The ‘general critique’ condemns EBE for excluding values from decisions about what to do in education. The ‘specific critique’ condemns EBE for relying on a deterministic view of causality in education which disregards the complex, value-laden nature of educational contexts. I argue that virtually all versions of EBE escape the general critique, including the dominant intervention-centered approach that relies on experimental research to discover ‘what works’, because the predictions EBE aims to support are only one premise in a broader normative argument. Further, intervention-centered EBE can avoid much of the specific values-based critique because it is consistent with a probabilistic, rather than deterministic, understanding of causality. However, I argue that only a context-centered approach to EBE that relies on evidence about the specific target setting from local sources in addition to evidence from theory and mixed methods research can fully address the specific critique by accommodating critics’ descriptive claims about the nature of educational contexts.