Beyond belief: Reframing teaching as a science-based profession

Some reflections on Douglas Carnine's classic article, "Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices.”

Photo credit: Abdullah Hyder featuring Tom Sherrington at ResearchED TO. 2025. ResearchEd is a grassroots movement bridging the gap between educational research and instructional practice.

Highlights:

• Carnine argues that education falls short of being a science-based profession.

• Fads and ideology tend to wield more influence over teacher training and professional development than science.

• A science-based teaching profession is possible. However, it requires a significant cultural shift that prioritizes evidence-based practices.
  

In his provocative paper, “Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices”, Douglas Carnine makes a bold claim: unlike medicine or engineering, education is not a science-based profession.

This may initially strike some teachers as odd. Don’t teacher education programs teach instructional methods that are well-grounded in evidence? Isn’t continuing professional development based on solid research?

Douglas Carnine argues that, for the most part, they are not.

In his paper, Carnine contends that education lacks the scientific rigor found in fields like medicine or engineering. He cites examples where educational thought-leaders rejected research-grounded approaches, such as Direct Instruction, even after they dramatically outperformed other models in large-scale, controlled studies. He goes on to suggest that instead of embracing what works, many education experts tend to prioritize untested innovations, or methods that align with their ideological preferences.

Is Carnine right?

We think he is. Education, as it currently stands, is clearly not a science-based profession. When teachers face a tough classroom problem, they rarely turn to research for answers. More often, they rely on instincts, experience, or strategies picked up from colleagues. That’s not to say these things don’t have value—they absolutely do. But it’s striking how seldom research is consulted.

Research also plays a surprisingly small role in inservice training. More often than not, professional development promotes ideas that are familiar, popular, or easy to present, but not necessarily ones that are science-based. Teachers who participate in these training sessions might assume that the instructional materials have been rigorously vetted. In reality, that’s unlikely. Countless hours of professional development have been spent — and are still spent — on edu-fads like learning styles and multiple intelligences, in spite of decades of research that have failed to show any benefits for student learning.

Experienced teachers have told us stories of their schools committing to a new educational initiative one year, only to see it quietly abandoned the following year. This can cause teachers to become skeptical or even cynical about new initiatives. When the latest "big idea" is rolled out with great fanfare but disappears without clear results, teachers begin to see these efforts as trends rather than meaningful improvements. Over time, this pattern erodes trust in leadership and reduces teacher engagement with future professional development. Instead of asking, “How can I apply this to improve student learning?”, teachers may start to wonder, “How long until this one fades away too?”

Why has progress in education been so slow?

Carnine makes a compelling argument that education’s failure to embrace scientific research explains why the profession, as a whole, has made such little progress over time. In medicine, new treatments are developed through a disciplined process of research, controlled testing, evaluation, and refinement. The benefits of this approach have been obvious. Life expectancy has increased dramatically. Deadly diseases have been eradicated or brought under control. We now have minimally invasive surgeries, advanced diagnostics, and targeted therapies that would have been unimaginable just a few generations ago.

Education, on the other hand, lacks this cycle of progressive improvement. In spite of decades of reform and billions spent on improvement initiatives, it’s not clear that teachers are any more effective today than they were fifty years ago. While the curriculum has evolved over that period, it would be difficult to claim that the quality of education has significantly improved or that the gap in student outcomes has narrowed substantially.

As Carnine puts it, education is trapped in a cycle of reinvention, constantly recycling ineffective ideas under new names rather than building on proven ones.

Teaching as a “belief-based” profession

Why does this cycle persist? Why do educators resist practices supported by rigorous research, while embracing unproven ones? Carnine suggests it’s because education functions more as a belief-based profession than a science-based one. Instructional practices are often chosen not for their demonstrated effectiveness, but because they align with personal or ideological convictions.

This helps explain why ideas like learning styles, discovery learning, and Brain Gym continue to circulate widely. They spread through books, conferences, and professional development, not because they’re backed by strong evidence, but because they align with popular beliefs or intuitions about how students learn. They feel right, which makes them appealing. But in many cases, the research supporting these approaches is weak, inconsistent or entirely absent.

Moreover, unlike medicine, where ineffective treatments are eventually phased out, education lacks a built-in feedback loop. There’s no reliable system for filtering out what doesn’t work, or elevating what does. As a result, beliefs and ideology often take precedence over impact. Moving from one fad to a new one gives teachers an illusion of progress, but rarely does it produce better learning.

Education’s belief-based culture isn’t confined to day-to-day practice. It begins early, during initial teacher preparation. Instead of emphasizing what we know from research about how learning works, programs often offer a buffet of strategies, theories, and ideologies. Assignments might include writing a personal philosophy of teaching, or designing a lesson that aligns with a particular educational theory. But there’s rarely pressure to review the research literature to see if a recommended instructional approach actually improves student learning.

Consequently, many teachers leave their preservice training with a handful of instructional strategies, and strong convictions, but little grounding in what research has shown to be most effective.

This is where the science of learning comes in. It invites a fundamentally different mindset.

What would it mean for teaching to become a science-informed profession?

Imagine a world where teaching, like medicine or engineering, is built on a solid foundation of science-based knowledge. In such a world, every teacher would understand how cognitive load affects learning. They’d know what the research says about retrieval practice and test anxiety, and how to design assessments that boost memory while building student confidence.

They’d be equipped with strategies that really help struggling learners, and they’d know why certain approaches tend to work better than others. They’d understand why students sometimes forget what they’ve learned, and how to prevent that from happening. Most of all, they’d have a strong, practical understanding of how people learn, and how to use that knowledge to teach more effectively.

The Science of Learning: A path forward

The science of learning represents an effort to turn teaching into a science-based profession. It’s grounded in decades of research from cognitive psychology, instructional design, and educational measurement. It offers educators something precious: clarity about how learning works and what kinds of instruction support it best.

Unlike educational fads or ideologies, the science of learning doesn’t begin with statements of belief or personal values. It begins with data. It evolves through experiment, replication, and critical scrutiny. And like other scientific disciplines, it invites us to change course as our understanding deepens.

That mindset—one of disciplined curiosity, openness to change, and commitment to continuous improvement—holds enormous promise for teaching.

But aren’t classrooms too complex for scientific approaches?

Some educators have expressed worries about turning teaching into a science-based profession. Would this lead to rigid standardization, where every teacher is expected to follow the same script? Is it even possible to apply scientific findings in a profession where each decision is so deeply shaped by individual differences and local contexts?

These are valid and important questions. Grounding teaching in research won’t make it simple or mechanical. The work would remain challenging and dynamic, filled with unexpected moments that demand insight, flexibility, and creativity. Every instructional decision would still need to account for diverse student backgrounds, classroom dynamics, curricular goals, and more.

But in a truly science-informed profession, educational research would serve as a powerful support system. It wouldn’t dictate every move a teacher makes, but it would offer well-tested guidance on what tends to work, and why. Teachers could still deviate from that guidance when necessary, but they’d be doing so from an informed position, aware of both the research and the reasons for choosing a different path. Teaching would still be creative, responsive, and deeply human—but it would also be anchored in a growing body of knowledge about how learning happens.

To be clear, the science of learning doesn’t call for rigid standardization. It respects teacher autonomy and professional judgment. But it asks us to exercise that judgment within a shared framework of evidence. It invites us to be part of a profession that refines its methods over time, based on what works, not just what’s popular.

Four steps toward a science-based profession

To transform teaching into a science-based profession, we need to build structures that support evidence-informed practice. Here are four ways to begin:

1. Prioritize Evidence-Based Practices in Initial Teacher Education

Teacher preparation programs should expose new teachers to proven instructional strategies, such as retrieval practice, spaced repetition, formative assessment, and explicit instruction. They represent some of the most consistent, well-replicated and compelling findings in educational research. These strategies have been rigorously tested and shown to improve learning across diverse contexts.

2. Strengthen Scientific Literacy

Teachers shouldn’t have to take research claims on faith. Like physicians reading medical journals, educators should be equipped to read, interpret, and evaluate research findings. That means building in coursework, tools, and habits of mind that help teachers ask: What’s the evidence for this? How strong is it? Does it apply to my students?

3. Establish a Shared Core of Professional Knowledge

Education lacks something most other professions have: a shared foundation of scientifically grounded knowledge. In medicine, every student learns anatomy, physiology, and pathology. In aviation, every pilot understands the laws of aerodynamics. Teaching should be no different. A shared understanding of learning, rooted in cognitive science and learning theory, would help unify the profession and reduce its susceptibility to fads.

4. Vet Professional Development for Evidence Quality

Teachers often assume that if a professional development session is being offered by the school board or a consultant, it’s evidence-based. But often there’s no formal system in place to ensure that’s true. As a result, professional development sessions often promote ideas that have little or no empirical support.

If we want to stop the spread of educational fads, we need a way to introduce quality-control to professional development. That means being transparent about the research behind what’s being taught, and honest when the evidence is weak or evolving.

A hopeful future

Transforming education into a science-based profession won’t be easy. One of the biggest barriers to change is cultural inertia. In education, “belief” runs deep. Even advocates of the science of learning sometimes talk about “believing” in things like explicit instruction or retrieval practice. It’s a practice that teachers must somehow overcome. When we frame instructional approaches in terms of belief, we continue the habit of replacing one set of intuitions with another, rather than cultivating the habit of critical inquiry that science demands.

The science of learning shouldn’t be seen as a set of practices to be accepted on faith. Rather it’s a growing body of evidence that helps us understand what works in education, and why. It calls on us to examine claims critically, adapt our methods as new evidence emerges, and always remaining open to the possibility that we might be wrong. By embracing this mindset, we can reshape education into a profession where instructional decisions are informed by research, where teachers are empowered with the knowledge they need, and where students benefit from practices that better support their learning.

References

Carnine, D. (2000). Why education experts resist effective practices (and what it would take to make education more like medicine). Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. https://www.wrightslaw.com/info/teach.profession.carnine.pdf