We have a visibility problem in our education research ecosystem

 One of the challenges in education research and evaluation is surprisingly basic: we don't really know what is happening.

At any given time, universities, government departments, foundations, NGOs and evaluators are conducting research and evaluations across the education system. Schools are participating in studies. Learners are being assessed. Teachers are completing surveys and being observed. Programmes are generating monitoring data. Reports are being produced.

But it is remarkably difficult to get a picture of what research and evaluation is happening where, what has already been completed, what data have already been collected, and what we have learned from it all.

This matters for very practical reasons. A funder may commission an evaluation without knowing that somebody else has investigated a similar question. A researcher may collect data that already exist elsewhere. A school may participate in several studies while another comparable school participates in none. And an evaluation may produce useful findings that live on a funder's website—or in someone's Google Drive—without becoming part of the evidence available to the wider system.

The problem, then, is not simply that research isn't disseminated well enough. We have a visibility problem across the research and evaluation lifecycle. We struggle to see what is planned, what is underway, what has been completed, what evidence and data already exist, and how individual pieces of work relate to one another.

That makes it much harder to move from lots of individual evaluations to cumulative learning about the education system.

The interesting thing is that we may not need to build a giant new repository to solve this. Several pieces of the infrastructure already exist, or are beginning to emerge. The question I've been thinking about is whether we could connect them differently. In the next post I share some ideas about how we can make research and evaluation more visibile. 

AI disclosure: I used ChatGPT to help structure, refine and edit this post, based on my own ideas, experience and source material. I reviewed and take responsibility for the final content.