Short Abstract

A digital platform enabling practitioners to run their own micro-RCTs underpins a participatory model for building evaluation cultures in education, combining PAR, Delphi methods, and storytelling to link classroom learning with policy and system improvement through reflection and co-production.

Description

Embedding evaluation into everyday professional practice is essential for education systems that aspire to learn, adapt, and improve continuously. This paper introduces an emerging model developed by WhatWorked Education, designed to build sustainable evaluation cultures that integrate reflection, learning, and co-production of evidence into routine educational decision-making.

The model combines Participatory Action Research (PAR), teacher-led micro-randomised controlled trials (micro-RCTs), Delphi consensus methods. Together, these methods create a participatory infrastructure that enables practitioners, schools, and policymakers to generate and use evidence collaboratively, embedding evaluation directly into professional practice rather than positioning it as an external, compliance-driven activity.

Central to the model is a digital platform that enables practitioners to design and run their own micro-RCTs within their classrooms or organisations. Teachers identify a promising practice, randomise pupils or groups, and upload pre- and post-test data to receive an automated impact report showing what worked for their class. Results from multiple classrooms are aggregated using cumulative meta-analysis, allowing small-scale practitioner experiments to build into a shared, living evidence base. These findings are then explored through Delphi consensus processes with teachers, leaders, and regional policymakers to interpret the results collectively and agree on priorities for scale-up. This cycle of experimentation, reflection, and consensus creates vertical coherence between classroom learning and system-level decision-making.

The model draws on the principles of Participatory Action Research by positioning practitioners as co-researchers and embedding evaluation within iterative cycles of planning, action, observation, and reflection. However, it extends traditional PAR by incorporating experimental rigour and structured decision-making. The combination of micro-RCTs and Delphi processes produces credible, transparent evidence while maintaining inclusivity and contextual relevance.

As the platform begins its next phase of development in Kenya, it can integrate culturally grounded storytelling approaches such as Tori Dey to ensure evidence generation remains meaningful and locally owned. The model’s ethical and cultural foundations draw on both Tori Dey and the African Evaluation Principles (AEP), which emphasise that evaluation should be relational, equitable, and rooted in context. Storytelling within African traditions functions not only as a way of communicating results but also as a participatory research method, translating data into narratives that are accessible, memorable, and trusted within communities. Guided by the philosophy of Ubuntu, which views knowledge as collective and interdependent, the approach seeks to strengthen relationships and shared learning throughout the evaluation process. Embedding these principles helps to decolonise evidence, ensuring that local educators and communities shape what is evaluated, how success is defined, and how findings inform action and improvement.

Technology and automation underpin the model’s scalability, reducing the burden on practitioners while maintaining methodological robustness. By aligning digital innovation with participatory design, the platform enhances accessibility, ownership, and transparency. This model offers a transferable framework for embedding evaluation into the everyday life of educational systems and other sectors. It reimagines evaluation as a collaborative, ethical, and adaptive process; one that transforms practitioners into evidence generators, policymakers into reflective partners, and data into stories that drive improvement across classrooms, and communities.