Knowledge creation as an approach to facilitating evidence informed practice: Examining ways to measure the success of using this method with early years practitioners in Camden (London)

Abstract

This paper has three key aims. First it examines the authors’ attempts to use knowledge creation activity as a way of developing evidence informed practice amongst a learning community of 36 early years practitioners in the London Borough of Camden. Second, it seeks to illustrate how the authors approached the idea of measuring evidence use and our engagement with two separate measurement scales: the ‘ladder of research use’ and Hall and Hord’s (Implementing change: patterns, principles and potholes, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 2001) levels of use scale. Finally we examine the ‘trustworthiness’ of our approaches to measuring evidence use, which we explored via in-depth semi-structured interviews and the analysis of meeting notes. Our findings would appear to be encouraging, suggesting that knowledge creation activity provides an effective way of communicating research and keeping it top of mind; also that our data would appear to support the trustworthiness of our measurement scales as a means to ascertain levels of evidence use. At the same time the approach we have developed does have its limitations: namely, that it is only really applicable to situations where researchers are working regularly with practitioners on areas of practice development, where the general desire is that these areas should become evidence-informed. We suggest, however, that in school systems such as England’s, where the expectation is that schools or alliances of schools should lead their professional development activity, often in partnership with universities, it is likely that these instances will soon be increasing in number.