Welcome to the first Teacher’s Bookshelf of 2026! How to Use Research Evidence Well In Education: A Guide For Educators and Leaders, is an open-access guide on how teachers and school leaders can use research well in real-world contexts. It includes practical examples, school case studies, key practices and improvement activities. Chapter 2 focuses on ‘Identifying a clear purpose’ and this excerpt – written by 2 of the book’s authors, Monash University professors Mark Rickinson and Lucas Walsh – shares a school case study of what identifying a clear purpose looks like in action.
To help you to see how the 2 key practices discussed in this chapter can work together in action, the following case study illustrates how a secondary school leader set about making research use in her school purposeful.
Sascha is an assistant principal in a metropolitan government secondary school of average socio-economic status. During interviews, she described how she gathered and interrogated a range of evidence to help her distil the idea of developing a different student assessment model for her school.
Specifying a need for improvement to drive research use
Sascha had gathered a range of evidence about student performance, wellbeing and engagement that showed how ‘we’d been plateauing a lot in terms of our outcomes across the board – all of our different data sets were telling us that we needed to improve’. Based on the evidence gathered, as well as knowledge gained from certain academic research, Sascha ‘built on [a] hunch’ that the summative assessment model at the school was a cause for concern.
I was looking at the different ways that people assess … [and] I was looking at the grading system that we’ve used [in education] for 150 years that was still used [in the school]. And I knew that it was just pointless, because it wasn’t resonating with kids at all. It was disengaging with kids.
Working collectively with other leaders, she ‘started going down [into] more nitty-gritty detail … starting to really look at assessment and really looking at [our] data’. She commented on the importance of probing evidence deeply: ‘It comes back to that evidence – really being able to pinpoint [where] students [are at] with that’.
She also consulted a mentor who was a principal at a different secondary school to check her understanding of what she was observing in her school, and to gain knowledge about how alternative assessment approaches might work in a similar context. She then formed an assessment working group with her school colleagues ‘to interrogate some of these ideas a little bit more’. She commented on the benefit of these relationships and group work.
We all started reading a bit more … and we started to look at how the things that we were reading about and exploring and discussing were actually put into practice and what that actually looked like at a whole-school level. And that really resonated. And that’s about when [the decision was made to focus on assessment] and we started building our framework for our school and coming up with what that would look like.
Promoting and explaining the purpose for research use
Having made the decision to design and implement a new research-informed assessment model, Sascha convened a whole-of-school presentation day prior to semester commencing to explain to staff the rationale of their decision making. One of the first things she did was to present the evidence gathered that highlighted issues with their current assessment model.
We were able to present data [to staff] … all which pretty much said [that] the longer that students stayed here, the [worse the results got.] … We had to do something different because whatever we were doing wasn’t working.
As a part of her explanation, Sascha drew on her knowledge of the school’s culture, emphasising that the issue of assessment was ‘tangible’ and relatable, and one that she believed teachers would consider as important ‘to look at their practice and to change their practice’. She conducted a question-answer session during the presentation day to confirm that staff agreed that the issue was a priority to address.
She also emphasised to staff that it was important to ‘align [the research-informed initiative] with our strategic direction at the time’. She commented:
It’s really important that everybody is onboard and going in the same direction. And I think … there has to be a really strategic approach to how we use research. It has to be built into what we do and how we do it. It needs to be built into our decision-making and we need to be strategically using it all of the time throughout our meeting times, the way we work at leadership, the way we work within our teaching teams, and then the way we work in our classroom.
Her explanation highlighted the risk of things continuing to be done in ‘adhoc’ ways that ‘don’t achieve any outcomes at all’ if research use purposes and decisions were not effectively communicated and operationalised in school practices and processes. Prior to the whole-of-school presentation day, the school leadership team decided that other change initiatives would be stopped so that the assessment issue could be given full attention by staff. This led Sascha to facilitate a session with learning leaders (who would play a role down the track in helping to implement the new assessment approach) where they worked together to identify initiatives that could stop or be reconfigured to align with the strategic design of the assessment model.
Communicating this decision and the outcomes of the learning leaders’ workshop at the whole-of-school presentation day helped Sascha to get buy-in to the new research-informed initiative from staff. Sascha explained that prioritising one change initiative meant that they could do it ‘really well’.
I guess it’s as much about being able to spotlight and do one thing and do it really well rather than trying to do everything. … My idea was that if you come down to [the research] … that will have such a ripple effect on everything else, that everything else will start to have an impact. And it’s about taking all those [other ideas] off the table so that our entire learning area leaders team focuses.
How to Use Research Evidence Well In Education: A Guide For Educators and Leaders, published by Routledge, is open access and available download free under a Creative Commons license.
References
Rickinson, M., Walsh, L., Gleeson, J., Cutler, B., Plant, B., Boulet, M., Hall, G., Cirkony, C., & Salisbury, M. (2025). How to use research evidence well in education: A guide for educators and leaders (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003375845
Thinking about your own context, how do you identify when a change is needed? What kinds of evidence do you look for?
This case study shares how the assistant principal worked with colleagues and a mentor to explore ideas. Who could you collaborate with to strengthen your use of research evidence?
In this example, the school leadership team stopped other change initiatives so staff could focus on one issue and give it their ‘full attention’. What will your whole-school improvement focus be this term, or this year?
