How to Use Research Evidence Well In Education: A Guide For Educators and Leaders, is an open-access guide on how teachers and school leaders can use research well in real-world contexts. It includes practical examples, school case studies, key practices and improvement activities. Chapter 2 focuses on ‘Identifying a clear purpose’ and this excerpt – written by 2 of the book’s authors, Monash University professors Mark Rickinson and Lucas Walsh – shares a school case study of what identifying a clear purpose looks like in action.
To help you to see how the 2 key practices discussed in this chapter can work together in action, the following case study illustrates how a secondary school leader set about making research use in her school purposeful.
Sascha is an assistant principal in a metropolitan government secondary school of average socio-economic status. During interviews, she described how she gathered and interrogated a range of evidence to help her distil the idea of developing a different student assessment model for her school.
Specifying a need for improvement to drive research use
Sascha had collected evidence about student performance, student wellbeing, and student engagement, which