What is the problem with finding evidence?
The Hidden Struggle in K-12 Education: Why Evidence is Hard to Find and Use
Finding and using evidence to make better decisions should not be a problem for parents and educators. Yet it is. Building a solution requires a deep understanding of why this disconnect exists and how to address it.
In co-creating Eddie (available to the public beginning on November 3rd - join the waitlist today), my business partner and I are making a bet that parents and educators experience problems with the status quo in finding and using evidence at home and in the classroom. Our solution is based on many assumptions, but that is the core problem we are trying to solve. On the surface, it should not be a problem.
Much of the research on what works to improve academic outcomes is freely accessible right now. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences–the research arm of the federal agency–has two fantastic resources that make research available (as long as the current administration maintains them): the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) and the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). Both serve slightly different purposes but offer free access to thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles that form the basis of the literature on improving academic outcomes.
In my previous job, I interviewed educators about the WWC. We found that most teachers were unaware of the WWC and its various products. Those who did know rarely used them. These resources are targeted to educators, so parents are even less aware of them. Many parents whom I have interviewed lately use Google or other non-academic sources, such as friends, parenting podcasts, TikTok, or other social media. There are several reasons for this disconnect.
By its very nature, academic articles are not written for practitioners. They include sections most laypeople would find unhelpful, such as a description of methodology that goes into great detail on the statistical approach used to conduct the study or conclusions that discuss the limitations of the research. If they describe the academic program, policy, or practice that was studied, details on how to implement are sparse. Worse still, these papers are filled with jargon intended for fellow researchers. One recent example came from my own household, where I searched for articles about ways to get my toddler to stop having tantrums. I discovered the academic community referred to these as “extinguishing strategies,” as if that was an obvious search term.
Even in the rare cases where practitioners are aware of the research, they lack the time to read through articles one by one. Teachers are estimated to work an average of 54 hours per week during the school year. Parents have to juggle home life and often two careers. The people most in need of the research are short on time and more often than not lack the specialized knowledge and skills to interpret what they find.
As I have conducted interviews with dozens of parents and educators over the past 6 months, they routinely tell me that they lack the time to find the research, and even when they do seek out the best approaches, they do not trust their current options. Evidence clearinghouses such as ERIC or Google Scholar take too much time to read and require training to interpret what they find there. Teachers are adopting large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude to perform administrative tasks at staggering speeds. Many of the educators who talked to me said they distrust what they receive. A better tool is needed, one that speeds up the process of sifting through the research while translating it into terms that everyday people can understand and use.
For Eddie, we are assuming parents and teachers want to use evidence to make better decisions for their children or students. One of the other major assumptions underlying our work is that we can solve this problem, to build a system that instantly reads the hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles to answer questions in plain language and then turns those answers into ready-to-use resources that parents and educators can use at home and in the classroom. As a researcher, I am excited to soon find out if my assumptions are correct.