Taming randomized controlled trials in education: exploring key claims, issues and debates

Abstract

Keith Morrison’s Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education provides a comprehensive theoretical and practical overview of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as a source of evidence in education. This book is an important and timely contribution to the topic of evidence-based education, offering a provocative and challenging position while paying careful attention to detail and weighting key arguments for and against RCTs in educational research. Making informed and evidence-based decisions is, naturally, central to the methods of scientific investigation, and RCT as the result of an interdisciplinary effort to evaluating interventions includes practices and assumptions from and across various interacting fields. For instance, “evidence-based education” emerges from “evidence-based medicine”, as noted by Coe et al. (2000). Randomised controlled trial research design, in turn, emerged from experimental research in education and psychology (Oakley, 1998), and RCTs in medical and educational research have a range of similarities and differences, as noted by Morrison (p. 103). In the last 2 decades, attention to RCTs in education has surged. This particular research design has been implemented across a broad range of studies, including those concerned with improving learning (Elliott, 2001; C. J. Torgerson & Torgerson, 2001), supporting evidence-based policy in education (Gorard et al., 2017; Katsipataki & Higgins, 2016), and studies focusing on eliminating global poverty (Banerjee et al., 2015; Tollefson, 2015). In recent years, the superiority of RCTs has often been taken for granted and considered to be a methodological “gold standard”. Morrison, however, challenges this habitual assumption in his new book, at least when it comes to considering results from RCTs in an educational context. This book is an important contribution to resources on randomised control trials, such as those authored by D. J. Torgerson and Torgerson (2008) and Glennerster and Takavarasha (2013), which provide introductions to the topic, alongside practical advice on planning, conducting, and evaluating RCTs. Morrison’s newly published book, however, offers a unique critical perspective on RCT research design and its role