Evidence in Learning and Didactics (ELD)

ELD is a cross-disciplinary initiative including the educational sciences, meta-science, as well as library and information science. Our starting point is that the great advances made in meta-science and open science over the past decade should be put to use to strengthen and improve evidence-based teaching in our schools.

We use meta-scientific methods to prioritize research areas based on where the need for updated evidence is the greatest, and whether the field is scientifically mature enough for evidence syntheses to be meaningful. Currently, we have a strong focus on foundational skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics in the early school years, cognitive science perspectives (i.e., The Science of Learning), and quantitative studies. Long term, we aim to broaden our scope to include additional research domains, perspectives, and methodological approaches.

Another long-term goal is to facilitate new high quality studies that address identified evidence gaps. Here, our aim is to collaborate with more empirically oriented research groups and contribute with expertise on methodology, design, bias, transparency, and related issues derived from our meta-scientific work. Pre-registered replication studies, and large-scale multi-site studies are particularly prioritized, since this type of research is often the next logical step once gaps have been identified.

Other important long-term goals involve communicating the best available knowledge to teachers and teacher students in an accessible way, as well as working on how evidence-based teaching methods can be implemented in Swedish schools in practice. As such, teaching on the topic of evidence-based education and The Science of Learning is a natural and important part of our mission.

ELD is a collaboration between the two sections Educational Psychology and the Methods and Metascience, both at the Department of Psychology. ELD is supported by the board of teacher education at Linnaeus University.