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)

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, situating the idea of effective evidence use within Flyvbjerg’s notion of expertise, it seeks to illustrate how the authors approached the idea of measuring evidence use. Specifically, how we sought to ascertain whether early years practitioners, having been continually engaged in knowledge creation activity, were developing expertise as evidence users. As part of this second aim, we examine our engagement with two separate measurement scales: the ‘ladder of research use’ and Hall and Hord’s (2001) Levels of Use scale. Finally we explore how we sought to examine the ‘trustworthiness’ of our approaches to measuring evidence use, via the use of in-depth semi structured interviews. We conclude by assessing our approach, examining both its strengths and limitations, and also highlighting other contexts and situations in which it might be used.