Evidence-based practice
One of the earliest proponents of evidence-based practice was Archie Cochrane, an epidemiologist who authored the book Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services in 1972.
Cochrane's book argued for the importance of properly testing health care strategies, and was foundational to the evidence-based practice of medicine.
[6] Cochrane suggested that because resources would always be limited, they should be used to provide forms of health care which had been shown in properly designed evaluations to be effective.
Some early experiments in evidence-based medicine involved testing primitive medical techniques such as bloodletting, and studying the effectiveness of modern and accepted treatments.
have suggested that the lack of any substantial progress in the field of education is attributable to practice resting in the unconnected and noncumulative experience of thousands of individual teachers, each re-inventing the wheel and failing to learn from hard scientific evidence about 'what works'.
Opponents of this view argue that it is hard to assess teaching methods because it depends on a host of factors, not least those to do with the style, personality and beliefs of the teacher and the needs of the particular children.
The process can be greatly simplified with the use of a heuristic that ranks the relative strengths of results obtained from scientific research, which is called a hierarchy of evidence.
[19] Evidence-based medicine is an approach to medical practice intended to optimize decision-making by emphasizing the use of evidence from well-designed and well-conducted research.
Although all medicine based on science has some degree of empirical support, evidence-based medicine goes further, classifying evidence by its epistemologic strength and requiring that only the strongest types (coming from meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and randomized controlled trials) can yield strong recommendations; weaker types (such as from case-control studies) can yield only weak recommendations.
[22] Originally developed to establish processes for the production of evidence in the housing sector, the standard is general in nature and is applicable across a variety of practice areas and potential outcomes of interest.
[25] Metascience has produced a number of reforms in science such as the use of study pre-registration and the implementation of reporting guidelines with the goal of bettering scientific research practices.
EBE has gained attention since English author David H. Hargreaves suggested in 1996 that education would be more effective if teaching, like medicine, was a "research-based profession".
[28] Since 2000, studies in Australia, England, Scotland and the US have supported the use of research to improve educational practices in teaching reading.
English author Ben Goldacre advocated in 2013 for systemic change and more randomized controlled trials to assess the effects of educational interventions.
[35] In 2014 the National Foundation for Educational Research, Berkshire, England[36] published a report entitled Using Evidence in the Classroom: What Works and Why.
