Systematic reviews of educational research: does the medical model fit?

There has been a recent increase in interest in the research review as a method of presenting cumulative data about the effects of educational policies and practices. This is part of a wider movement in 'evidence-informed policy-making' espoused by the current Government. In part, the interest as been sparked by the perceived success of the Cochrane Collaboration in medicine, which has set up a framework for conducting and verifying systematic reviews and meta-analyses of random controlled trials of medical interventions. A pilot project to apply the methods of systematic review has been carried out at the National Foundation for Educational Research. The subject of the review was 'Strategies to Support Pupils with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties in Mainstream Primary Classrooms'. The article describes the process of the review, the adaptations of the 'medical model' to educational settings and discusses some of the implications of these for researchers and policy-makers.