English
Promoting best practices in the synthesis of education research
Project funding
Supported by the Yidan Prize project funds
Education theme
Policymaking and systemic change
Contents
Overview
Background
About the idea
More to explore
Reshaping the design of education research post-Covid to support evidence-based policy and practice in education
What does education research look like after Covid-19? Through two new books and researcher training, Professor Larry Hedges is building the base for scholarship in robust research design and methodology — with the wider aim of encouraging evidence-based policy and practice in education.
Laureate(s)
Background
Research is key to tackling education’s biggest issues — but it’s not always easy to use
With so many education studies around (often coming to contradictory conclusions), it can be difficult for policymakers to act on the evidence in front of them. For over 40 years, Professor Larry Hedges’ meta-analysis methods have given policymakers the tools to sort through studies available and understand what works.
More generally, Larry’s goal is to help transform the loose-knit study of education into a more rigorous science — one that accumulates, interprets, and applies knowledge through testing. Larry sees three ways to strengthen educational research: creating rigorous methods for research; training researchers; and improving how research findings are shared.
The post-pandemic era presents new research challenges and opportunities
Before the pandemic, Larry used part of his prize funds to found the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center to focus on using evidence to guide decision-making — especially in education and applied social sciences. It’s a hub that brings together groups of education experts including statisticians, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to forge closer ties. He had planned to devote more funds to building connections between research clearinghouses, too — but then Covid shut down travel and networking went on hold.
The pandemic did more than temporarily disrupt education — it permanently changed systems and practices. As a result, we need to consider other ways to design research — such as evaluating education interventions quickly in emergency situations. Using Yidan Prize’s flexible project funding, Larry now focused it on further developing another of his aims: defining and promoting robust research methodology.
About the idea
Building the base of scholarship on research design and methodology
Larry is now working on researching and writing two books about the theory and practice of education research. He’ll also launch research institutes — multi-day training gatherings for researchers — in the US and Europe to spread the adoption of the research methods defined in the books.
With Elizabeth Tipton, Co-director of the STEPP Center, Larry’s writing a book on how to do robust research on educational interventions quickly and easily in the field. It’s inspired by the need to do quicker, cheaper research in emergency situations—such as when learning rapidly moved online in many places during lockdowns. In those circumstances, we can’t wait for longer-term definitive studies, and resources are likely to be limited. Not all changes are improvements, and educators need to find out — quickly — which changes are for the better.
In a second book, Larry maps the kind of approach medicine takes to large clinical trials and applies it to the field of education. Certain issues rooted in education have made it more difficult to carry out larger-scale studies in education — and a great deal of work on the design and analysis of such studies already exists. But this work is scattered, written from different perspectives, and is often expressed in ways that make it hard to reconcile terms across the work of different authors. Larry’s goal is to bring that progress together under a unifying theory, as well as expanding on it to address problems that are likely to come up in the post-pandemic era.
Our 2018 laureate Professor Larry Hedges used part of his project funds to launch the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center in 2019. He is now using the rest of his funds to complete two books.