Centre for Professional Learning 5 December, 2024 by Misty Adoniou
The Federal government committed $34.6 million in the 2024 Budget ‘to make evidence-based curriculum and student wellbeing support and professional development materials. In July NSW launched a ‘revamped’ curriculum that is ‘clear, evidence-based and carefully sequenced’. (NSW Government, 2024)
Who can argue? We all want our children taught by methods that have evidence behind them. Yet these political pronouncements, and the accompanying media frenzy, seem to imply that up until now this has not been the case.
But of course, our children have always been taught through evidence-based methods. All teacher education degrees are evidence-based. Departments of Education have always used evidence to develop curricula and provide professional learning for teachers.
Teacher Education has been an academic discipline for over a century. That is about 50 years longer than Macroeconomics, 60 years longer than Cognitive Psychology and 75 years longer than Media Studies.
To be a member of the ‘academy’, the field of Teacher Education fulfils the requirements of being a science. This means conducting studies under defined conditions to ensure validity, reliability and accuracy, and submitting those studies for peer review to have them questioned, clarified, rejected or accepted. This is how knowledge is built in the sciences – including in Teacher Education which has about 130 years of this scientific knowledge building behind it.
The NSW and Federal governments have both declared initiatives to make curricula ‘evidence-based’. Yet, the national Australian Curriculum we have today, and which is taught in some form or other in every Australian school, including NSW, drew on a huge evidence base from domestic and international studies, and several years of research consultations with academics and educators before it was finally released in 2011. It has undergone many reviews since then, making changes in response to new evidence from research studies in curriculum, teaching and learning. The latest review was in 2021, and we are now at Version 9 of our national curriculum. We have always had evidence-based curricula – it has always been the task of the various federal, state and territory curriculum authorities to ensure this.
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