Do Educators Need to See the Evidence?

I recently attended the Education Knowledge Broker Network’s (EKBN) annual forum. The EKBN is a professional community for people working in diverse roles (e.g., researcher, coach, consultant) across a range of educational sectors (e.g., schools, nonprofits, research institutions) to support research use in educational contexts.

Evidence Use in Education Under Threat

It has been a challenging time for those of us working to support evidence-informed policy and practice in education. The Institute of Education Sciences, which supported states and districts in generating and using research evidence to support student outcomes through no-cost research and technical assistance, was largely defunded and dismantled in early 2025.

The loss of federal resources for evidence generation and use in schools and classrooms has created a gap that states and districts largely do not currently have the resources or human capacity to fill. Related, one of the forum sessions I attended shared findings from interviews over the past year with staff in state education agencies about their needs moving forward in the wake of lost federal support for research and evidence use.

Days later, I’m still wrestling with an observation from one state education official, who expressed the belief that educators do not need to engage with the evidence on the programs and practices (e.g., curricula, instructional programs) they are asked to use; this evidence should simply be embedded upstream by the developers and researchers.

The Case for Evidence Use, Including with Educators

Yet educators – who have the largest impact on student achievement out of all factors within schools’ control – are responsible for implementing the policies, curricula, programs, and practices their districts select. And teachers’ beliefs about the potential of new initiatives to help their students, including what research evidence says about these programs and practices, influences the quality of implementation.

Over the past decade-plus working in education research and evidence use, I have seen time and again the importance of teachers’ beliefs about and confidence in the strategies and materials they are asked to use. Teachers’ understanding of the evidence that instructional resources will be effective with their students is key – and knowledge brokers can play an essential role in working with leaders and teachers to connect evidence to practice.