Rien Rouw Ministry of Education Holland

CERI conference November 3rd 2014

“That may be true, but it is not what people believe”

[Canadian minister]

“It is hard to improve what you do not deeply understand”

[prof. Bryk]

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* Multidimensional

* Simultaneous

* Immediate

* Unpredictable

* Public

* Historical

* Kind of thinking: quick, implicit (‘tacit’), automatic, “holistic recognition of situations” and “intuitive judgment about actions needed”

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Policy

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1. Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research (Sackett et al)

2. Integration of experience, judgement and expertise with the best available external evidence from systematic research (Davies, Cabinet Office)

3. Decisional capital as a third pillar besides human capital and social capital (Fullan en Hargreaves)

*Experimentalism

*Trial and error as the source for improvement

*Building coalitions

*Various perspectives as the source for deep understanding

*Effectiveness insight, Cooperation in experimental designs

* between policymakers and researchers at the Ministry of Education

* policymakers need to translate randomized research methodology into the design of an intervention

* to create mutually comparable intervention and control groups

* for instance by distributing a grant at random

*‘Evidence for Education’: special fund

* 23 million euro spread through competition

* Only consortia of research institutes and schools could apply

* Methodological demand: exclusively RCT’s

* 37 experiments

*Brokerage needed: either a third party, capable / specialized reseachers or practitioners

* Good experiments need input from the field, scientists with expertise in the field, scientists with statistical expertise

* Insight in explanatory mechanisms is crucial

* Systemic approach needed

* Political tension is not a good condition for experimental research

*Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO)

* To program coherently fundamental, policy-oriented and practice-oriented research

* To bridge the gap between research and practice

*Match Making Meetings

*Only consortia can apply for practice-oriented research

* To make research easy accessable for practitioners

*Regional partnerships between universities, universities of applied science, teacher training institutes and schools

*Close cooperation between researchers and teachers

*Combined with teacher training

*Development of reflective practitioners

*Teachers as researchers

*m.a.rouw@minocw.nl

* Continuous interaction: involve policymakers in generating a report

* Direct connections: no intermediary organisations

* Dialogue with various research ‘schools’ / traditions:

evidence from various perspectives, both quantitative and qualitative, both causality and explanatory mechanisms

* Multiple channels:

scientific reports, short summaries, video, blogs, workshops, seminars etc.

* Multilevel: the level of facts, of discourses and of beliefs

* Brokerage as specific function:

- organized as a specific function or profession, not necessarily in a separate institution

- exercised by people of a certain kind: researcher nor policymaker, a go-between by heart

* Capacity: of policymakers to interpret research, to judge results and to process them into policy

* Systemic: involves practitioners, researchers, policymakers and mediators

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