Evidence-informed practice in education: combining multimodal sources of evidence towards actionable insights

The use of evidence in educational practice has been on the rise for the past two decades. Educational professionals are assumed to underpin decisions about, for instance, instruction methods with evidence. An increasing number of sources of evidence can be tapped into by professionals such as the existing scientific knowledge base, self-collected evidence through classroom observations, but more recently, also learning analytics from digital learning platforms data becomes available to teachers. This trend places them for a multitude of challenges when processing this information. Literature has pointed out that even for one single source of evidence, the process of turning data into actionable insights is complex for teachers. Now that multimodal sources of evidence come into play, it is expected that this might lead to conflicting evidence which might add an additional layer of complexity. This research project will examine (1) to what extent teachers are experiencing such conflicting evidence, what elements are contributing to that experience of conflict and (2) how teachers deal with this conflicting evidence for decision-making and practices.