Facing the Goldilocks dilemma: Is there too much or too little educational research?

Perspective Article

Published on: September 24, 2024

6 min read

JULIA FLUTTER, PROFESSIONAL DOCTORATE RESEARCHER, FACULTY OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, UK At the Learning and Teaching Conference 2023 at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Gert Biesta raised a few eyebrows in his keynote address, challenging the audience with an important question: How much research does teaching need? Was Biesta was more likely to argue that too much, rather than too little, educational research is currently on offer? In fact, he went on to suggest that although there is a great deal of research, not all of this evidence supports the needs of educational practitioners. Too much educational research is narrowly focused and brackets out questions about values, in Biesta’s view: On the research side, evidence-based education seems to favour a technocratic model in which it is assumed that the only relevant research questions are questions about the effectiveness of educational means and techniques, forgetting, among other things, that what counts as

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