ABSTRACT
Background: Often, a principal’s responsibilities include making decisions about the appropriateness of educational programmes to adopt in their school. Recommendations about programmes can be conflicting; so, a principal may need to search for evidence to inform their decision.
Purpose: The purpose of this small-scale study was to clarify how school leaders search for, and use, evidence to inform programme adoption. We sought to answer three research questions: (1) how do principals search for evidence, (2) how do they use common sources and (3) what sources do they consider most useful?
Sample: Twelve elementary school principals or vice-principals in Ontario, Canada participated in the study.
Design and methods: In telephone interviews, the participants described how they would respond to a fictional decision-making scenario and rated different sources of evidence. Responses were analysed in depth, using a mixed-method approach, which involved coding principals’ interview responses for themes and conducting a dual scaling analysis of their ratings of the usefulness of possible sources.
Results: Principals report valuing formal sources of evidence such as reports and articles. However, in practise, findings indicated that they would turn to people first.
Conclusions: School leaders prefer curated evidence from local educators to inform their decisions about the appropriateness of educational programmes for potential adoption.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.