Evidenced Based Research
As I begin to plan my research assignment I have been reading about evidenced based research and what it entails.

Here's my summary of Robert Coe's Manifesto for Evidence-Based Education (1999).
 
The three main ways in which education could become more "evidence-based"are: 

• development of evidence-based policies - policy based on evidence that new initiatives introduced will work in the most challenged schools and those that have no reason to change.
• evidence-based practice - research involves not only measuring things, but the interpreting of results. This means that researchers and teacher's need to collaborate as teacher's local knowledge makes them vital participants in the processes of framing research questions and in collecting and interpreting data. 
• promotion of a "culture of evidence" - the culture of social science can allow for opinion can to have a status equal to - or even greater than - that of evidence as a basis for action. We need to change that culture so that the question, "Where is the evidence?" becomes the first thing we think of when presented with a suggested change of practice or policy. 
  
  I need to to get a handle on what types of evidence I would like to gather and how I am going to collect it.