Will education ever embrace empirical research?

Teaching has suffered both as a profession in search of community respect and as a force for improving the nation's social capital because of its failure to adopt the results of empirical research as the major determinant of its practice. There are a number of reasons why this has occurred, among them a science- aversive culture endemic among education policymakers and teacher education faculties. There are signs that change may be afoot in several countries. The Australian National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy has pointed to, and urged us to follow, a direction similar to that taken recently in Great Britain and the U.S. towards evidence-based practice. However, the generally low quality of much educational research in the past has made the process of evaluating the evidence difficult, particularly for those teachers who have not had the training to discriminate sound from unsound research designs. Fortunately, there are a number of august bodies that have performed a sifting process to assist judging the value of research on important educational issues.