ABSTRACT
In the last 15 years or more, there has been a significant shift towards what has been called “evidence-based education”. In the UK context, R. Coe equates “evidence based” with randomised controlled trials and their derivatives. This appears to support R. J. Sampson’s argument that “evidence” is often taken exclusively to mean the results of experimental designs. A key argument has been that the often cited analogy with medicine is fundamentally flawed, and, moreover, that within medicine this rigid notion of a fixed “gold standard” research method is increasingly questioned. Complex systems in which conscious agents interact and which co-evolve with other systems are not susceptible to randomised controlled trials or their derivatives, and the UK’s Medical Research Council is now recognising the difficulties of using methods designed for simple, non-interacting situations for complex social ones.
