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Tracey Burns reports back from the:
Campbell Collaboration Annual symposium in Oslo, Norway, 18-20 May 2009
The Campbell Colloquia began in 2001, with the goal of bringing together researchers and policy makers from around the world to discuss systematic reviews of research evidence on the effectiveness of social interventions, and the methodology involved. In addition to education, the programme features a variety of presentations of completed systematic reviews in the fields of health, knowledge mobilization, social welfare and criminal justice. It thus provides an opportunity for cross-discipline fertilization and transfer of knowledge, as well as hands-on opportunities through training sessions on methodologies, systematic reviews, and other knowledge transfer issues.
The colloquium was opened by Jonas Gahr Støre, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Norway, followed by a plenary address from Richard Horton, the Editor-in-chief of The Lancet. Other notable addresses included work by Andy Oxman (Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services) on whether impact evaluations of public programmes should be mandatory and Hans Rosling, Professor of Global Health at the Karolinska Institute (Sweden). His presentation, entitled "Towards an evidence-based world view", was quite simply one of the most astonishing public speaking performances the audience had ever seen. In a very short space of time he was able to challenge our assumptions not only of how changing demographics and economies had re-written standard perceptions that underlie many policy decisions in public service fields, especially health, but also demonstrate how one could effectively and interestingly present such data to a general audience.
Our session, which took place on the last day, was entitled “Using evidence to change complex educational systems”. The panel was composed of Charles Ungerleider; Director, Research and Knowledge Mobilization of the Canadian Council on Learning, David Gough of the EPPI-Centre in the UK, and myself. We had previously worked together in the CERI Evidence-based Policy Research (EbPR)project and this panel is one of several examples of the networks that were built during that project.
The audience was large and varied, with researchers and policy makers from education, social welfare, criminal justice, and knowledge mobilization. While Charles Ungerleider covered the political economy of reform and David Gough looked more closely at the political process in education in the last decade in the UK, I spoke to our work on EbPR and Systemic Innovation in Vocational Education and Training, drawing connections between systemic innovation and the process of public policy reform.
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