Read Online I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre - Free Book Online

errors of over-interpretation and getting the basic arithmetic wrong. I’ve never fully seen the point of them, but until now, I assumed that’s what thinktanks and Professors of the Public Understanding of Science are there for.

Building Evidence into Education 1
    I think there is a huge prize waiting to be claimed by teachers. By collecting better evidence about what works best, and establishing a culture where this evidence is used as a matter of routine, we can improve outcomes for children, and increase professional independence.
    This is not an unusual idea. Medicine has leapt forward with evidence-based practice, because it’s only by conducting ‘randomised trials’ – fair tests, comparing one treatment against another – that we’ve been able to find out what works best. Outcomes for patients have improved as a result, through thousands of tiny steps forward. But these gains haven’t been won simply by doing a few individual trials, on a few single topics, in a few hospitals here and there. A change of culture was also required, with more education about evidence for medics, and whole new systems to run trials as a matter of routine, to identify questions that matter to practitioners, to gather evidence on what works best, and then, crucially, to get it read, understood, and put into practice.
    I want to persuade you that this revolution could – and should – happen in education. There are many differences between medicine and teaching, but they also have a lot in common. Both involve craft and personal expertise, learnt over years of experience. Both work best when we learn from the experiences of others, and what worked best for them. Every child is different, of course, and every patient is different too; but we are all similar enough that research can help find out which interventions will work best overall, and which strategies should be tried first, second or third, to help everyone achieve the best outcome.
    Before we get that far, though, there is a caveat: I’m a doctor. I know that outsiders often try to tell teachers what they should do, and I’m aware this often ends badly. Because of that, there are two things we should be clear on.
    Firstly, evidence-based practice isn’t about telling teachers what to do – in fact, quite the opposite. This is about empowering teachers, and setting a profession free from governments, ministers and civil servants who are often overly keen on sending out edicts, insisting that their new idea is the best in town. Nobody in government would tell a doctor what to prescribe, but we all expect doctors to be able to make informed decisions about which treatment is best, using the best currently available evidence. I think teachers could one day be in the same position.
    Secondly, doctors didn’t invent evidence-based medicine. In fact, quite the opposite is true: just a few decades ago, best medical practice was driven by things like eminence, charisma and personal experience. We needed the help of statisticians, epidemiologists, information librarians and experts in trial design to move forwards. Many doctors – especially the most senior ones – fought hard against this, regarding ‘evidence-based medicine’ as a challenge to their authority.
    In retrospect, we’ve seen that these doctors were wrong. The opportunity to make informed decisions about what works best, using good-quality evidence, represents a truer form of professional independence than any senior figure barking out his opinion. A coherent set of systems for evidence-based practice listens to people on the front line, to find out where the uncertainties are, and decide which ideas are worth testing. Lastly, crucially, individual judgement isn’t undermined by evidence: if anything, informed judgement is back in the foreground, and hugely improved.
    This is the opportunity that I think teachers might want to take up. Because some of these ideas might be new to some readers, I’ll