Introduction

Nobel Prize-winning economist, psychologist and computer scientistH.A. Simon, in his classic text The sciences ofthe artificial, classified education as a ‘design’discipline:

This chapter takes the concept of education as a design discipline,and considers its goals and the ways in which various forms ofevidence are used to formulate policies and practices with respectto these goals. In doing so it explores the ongoing debate ineducation about the quality of research, its relevance and itsability to influence policy and practice. Some of these themes aboutsupply-side defects in research and the demand for research arepicked up again in Chapter Eleven, which explicates the UKgovernment strategy with respect to research in education. However,here the aim is to explain the current common sources of evidence ineducation, their methodological features and their influence.Examples are provided of the ways in which policy makers haveresponded to three major types of evidence: survey data includingmore recently ‘performance indicators’; evaluation data arising frompolicy initiatives; and the findings from experiments. Thistrichotomy follows the distinction drawn by a president of the RoyalStatistical Society, Sir David Cox. He suggested three types ofdata: that which arises from passive observation (such as surveys);that which is observed when there has been an intervention but onenot fully under the control of the researcher (evaluations); anddata arising from active intervention (true experiments).

Education: a guide to the territory

Having identified education as one of the design disciplines, Figure4.1 provides a map of the goals and the contexts within which thesegoals are sought. This set of categories both reflects past researchconcerns in education, and informs the modern development ofindicator systems. Bloom's 1956 Taxonomy ofeducational objectives suggested three types of goalsfor education: the widely recognised cognitive goals of learning; the important but moredifficult to assess affective goalssuch as child happiness, aspirations, and satisfaction with school;the ever-challenging behavioural goalssuch as influencing students to attend school (and behave well whilethere), to adopt healthy eating habits, and to acquire importantskills.