In the latest AARE blog, Professor Linda Graham from C4IE, shares timely reflections on the KPMG review of the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO).
KPMG is conducting a review of the Australian Educational Research Organisation (AERO), a ministerial-owned company funded by the Commonwealth, state and territory governments.
I learned of the review, not through a media release or Ministerial announcement, but through a flurry of posts on social media, some critical of AERO and others leaping to its defence. The review includes in-person interviews, but also includes an easily-gamed survey that has significant design flaws. Anyone can fill it out, any number of times and can pretend to be any kind of stakeholder.
So it is important that we look carefully at what is being said publicly. The recent posts critical of AERO make a range of valid points but there are some interesting patterns in the posts coming to its defence.
One pattern is where the concerns are re-articulated and then dismissed as “misunderstandings about” or, elsewhere, “resistance to” evidence-based practice. It’s a short walk from there to the other pattern, whereby education research and the academics who produce it are caricaturised as ill-informed or worse.
Zombie products
The caricatures draw on a discourse that has long been in operation in England and imported here courtesy of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, championed by conservative think-tanks, like the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs.
This discourse conflates the re-circulation of zombie products, programs, and ideas (aka Brain Gym, and “VAK” Learning Styles) with current education research, researchers, and university Initial Teacher Education. Writ large.
Seldom do those wielding this discourse acknowledge the potential commercial benefit from a new “open market”, cleansed of ‘hapless’ university academics and teacher educators.
Nor is it acknowledged that there is huge diversity in education researchers and in teacher education programs.
Never is solid evidence provided to support claims of charlatanry. We’re just inundated with the same claims time and again.
US far right figure and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone”. And legitimate critique is in danger of being drowned out in the process.
Black and white
Let’s look at what Dwyer, Fuller and Humberstone said in a recent AARE EduResearch Matters blog, as this blog achieved national media attention, and most likely prompted the defensive responses.
I won’t republish the whole blog here but present this excerpt as an example of legitimate critique:
The evidence and resources presented by AERO appear to position teachers as incapable of understanding and interpreting research, then making professional judgments based on their students and the school content. AERO presents the research as if it was black and white – “proven”, incontestable facts. The evidence is presented as an instruction manual, with no space for professional judgments or critique.
I don’t read this passage as a misunderstanding of or argument against evidence-based practice. Rather, the authors are taking issue with the surety with which AERO is making claims about the evidence it has selected, and the level of prescription in the materials they produce.
I share these concerns. Researchers are trained (especially those in the cognitive sciences) not to speak beyond the data or to make causal claims.
This is why you will find words like “suggest” and “indicate” in peer-reviewed research publications, even when something has been shown to “work”.
AERO’s materials have not been subjected to the same rigour and do not reflect the same caution. Dwyer, Fuller and Humberstone are quite right to call that out.
Right on another level
But these authors are right on another level too. While their appeal to professional judgement has elsewhere been dismissed with the old “choose your own adventure” chestnut, professional judgement is critical in classroom teaching because nothing works for all students, all of the time.
In my own field, inclusive education, flexibility is key. The more prescriptive we are with teachers, the less they will be able to mix things up when they need to.
Before anyone paints me as an apologist for whole language, discovery learning, Brain Gym, VAK learning styles (take your pick of the education evils), I’m not.
In fact, for the last five years I’ve been leading a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council that melds insights from the cognitive and communication sciences with those from inclusive education.
I also think cognitive load theory has much to offer instructional design, but it is not everything. And the evangelism with which it and other favoured practices are being disseminated by AERO risks swinging us to the other extreme.
A key tension
In writing up the findings from our ARC Linkage project in a new book for educators, I’ve struggled with a key tension that AERO has either resolved to their satisfaction or never contemplated in the first place, that is: what and how much to put out there, against what to hold back and why.
Our research suggests* that enhancing the accessibility of summative assessment task sheets significantly increases achievement outcomes for students with and without disabilities impacting language and information processing.
Great, right? Yes, it is. And we want every student in every classroom across Australia to benefit from this evidence.
But how to achieve this? We *could* develop a stack of accessible assessment task sheets and even create a commercial enterprise to pump it all out, pronto. Teachers won’t have to do a thing, we contribute to solving the workload problem, and we earn precious research income for all our effort.
Win, win, right?
Wrong. If we did that, we would rob teachers of the knowledge and skills they need to design accessible assessment. Knowledge and skills that they can later draw on to create modules in their school’s online learning management system or when developing learning resources.
We would also rob them of the creative and intellectual pleasure that can be found in the creation of said learning materials.
We would risk de-professionalising teachers more than they already have been by canned curriculum resources that promise to save teachers’ time, but which are inflexible, not appropriate for students with disability, and difficult/time-consuming to adjust.
So, we’re not doing that. We have made our resources freely available on our website in the hope they will do good in the world but are leaving teachers to make decisions about the curriculum content to go in those resources, and supporting as many as we can to do this with ongoing professional learning.
An urgent course correction needed
This decision goes to the heart of the concerns raised about AERO and the appeal by education researchers to not just preserve but to nurture teachers’ professional expertise and judgement.
This can’t be achieved by flooding the zone with practice guides, infographics, and narrow prescriptions to teach for how some students learn (with “tiered interventions” for the rest).
We’ll find that out in time.
My only hope is that the KPMG review leads to an urgent course correction because the criticisms of AERO are well-founded. It is time for the Commonwealth state, and territory governments to listen – and act.
The full article is also available here: On AERO: Read this now. The critiques are well-founded. – EduResearch Matters
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Professor Linda Graham is Director of The QUT Centre for Inclusive Education (C4IE) and a Professor in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice at QUT. She leads the Accessible Assessment ARC Linkage Project and one of QUT’s new university wide units, QUT004: Living and Working Collaboratively, Ethically and Inclusively, which recently won an Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education and Training (ADCET) Accessibility in Action award. |