Abstract:
Evidence for Learning (E4L) is a new social enterprise incubated by Social Ventures Australia (SVA), with the UK’s Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Commonwealth Bank as founding partners. Through its Learning Impact Fund, Evidence for Learning supports educational innovations to demonstrate their impact and, if appropriate, move to scale. E4L’s purpose is to enable and support a culture of evidence-informed practice in Australian schools. E4L will achieve this purpose through three lines of action: building, sharing, and encouraging the use of evidence to inform education practice and policy.E4L builds new evidence through its Learning Impact Fund. The Fund identifies, funds and commissions evaluations of programs that will raise the academic achievement of Australian children, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Broadly speaking, the life-cycle of a new education program can be conceived in terms of four phases: (1) initial design, piloting and codification at a limited scale; (2) demonstrating efficacy under close to ideal conditions at a medium scale; (3) demonstrating effectiveness under non-ideal conditions at a large scale; (4) delivery at significant scale. The Learning Impact Fund supports promising programs to move through these phases, commissioning independent RCTs at the efficacy and effectiveness levels to demonstrate the value in continuing to enlarge the scale at which the program operates.This section of the symposium will present E4L’s rationale for using RCTs in the evaluations it commissions, commenting on the place of RCTs in the broader education research landscape and addressing some criticisms of the value of RCTs for policy and practice. It will also present key considerations E4L makes in the design of trials (including appropriate implementation evaluation) and in communicating the findings of the trials to education practitioners and policy makers. A key consideration is maximizing the probability that policy makers and practitioners will use trial findings to make decisions that will influence the quality of teaching.