Is the Educational ‘What Works’ Agenda Working? Critical Methodological Developments (pt 2)

In this second part of this double special issue, we continue to investigate the ‘What works’ agenda, challenging methods and developing a debate around how best to research, and revealing implications for policy and practice. In the first part (Pampaka, Williams, and Homer 2016), we focussed on what might be considered relatively ‘orthodox’ ‘what works’ approaches, with the dominant theme being impact evaluations and educational randomized control trials (RCTs), along with systematic reviews and meta-analysis. Another theme was that of effective communication and dissemination in order to reach maximum impact with the relevant stakeholders. A key aspect of our endeavour is the need on all sides of the debate to ensure that research is both rigorous and relevant, and we began asking in the first issue: Can this be achieved with current methods? In other words, can we have sufficient rigour in our methods whilst simultaneously also providing findings relevant to current educational concerns and decision-making? In this second part, we develop these arguments further across five new papers.