What's wrong with evidence? Epistemological roots and pedagogical implications of "evidence-based practice" in STEM education

Abstract

Education's drive toward instrumentality is manifest in the no-child left behind regime of K-12 education in which "rigorous" curricula are measured by how efficiently and cost-effectively information is transferred. It is this context that informs the surge in popularity of "evidence based practice" across STEM education, with grave consequences for the field of engineering education research and for liberal education efforts in engineering. This paper first examines the history and epistemological roots of evidence based practice, beginning with the field of medicine, where randomized controlled field trials are the sine qua non of validity and rigor. What ways of knowing are included and excluded in evidence based practice? What counts as evidence? What questions are worth asking, and what questions are out of bounds in this regime? How have federal government definitions that guide evidence based research reproduced certain values and assumptions in our community as we apply standards of rigor in engineering education research? The paper then takes up the pedagogical implications of the evidence based model in which interventions are the sole purview of teachers, with presumed power to cause students to learn "better." The contradictions of using this approach despite "learner centered" rhetoric lead us to a closer examination of enacted and intended pedagogies in engineering education. A critical practice calls out the lack of reflexivity in evidence based practice; critical practice asks only what is effective in a classroom, not what is appropriate, or what should be learned. Those of us concerned about liberal education in engineering ought to be especially wary of evidenced based practice because it stands to narrow our research epistemologies, limit our pedagogies, and inhibit our critical practice. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.