The role of evidence in teaching practice from the point of view of the main actors

Abstract

The relationship between research and educational practice exerts a great deal of influence on the development of the teaching-learning process. Knowing the role played by evidence in teaching practice is essential in understanding education today and being able to design scenarios of improvement fostered by scientific evidence. With the goal of further examining the relationship between scientific evidence and educational practices on the one hand and teachers’ perception of the use of evidence on the other, a quantitative study was conducted via surveys administered to 462 teachers at schools in Barcelona and the Community of Madrid. The results show the importance that teachers attach to evidence and the characteristics that scientific evidence should have in order to have direct repercussions on teaching practice: relevance, approachability, accessibility, and practicality. What stands out is the value that teachers attach to the experiences of their own or others’ educational practices more than to theoretical knowledge. Furthermore, we can see how the variables of age, gender, educational level, educational level in which they teach, and ownership of the school condition the teachers’ perceptions of the relationship between scientific evidence and their educational practice. We conclude that these results enable key advances in the roadmap towards a culture of evidence-based practices in education and promote in-depth reflection on how research and its evidence effectively reach teachers.