J. Carl Hughes

Developing an evidence‐base for educational provision can be an arduous journey. To facilitate consistent and accurate implementation of promising approaches, research efforts need to answer questions relating to theoretical coherence, efficacy, effectiveness, cost, ease of use, and acceptability. An evidence‐building framework can help us to think critically about the current state of evidence and plan a long‐term research programme. In this conceptual paper, we draw attention to an evidence‐building framework from medical and psychosocial science that conceptualises the phases and challenges along this journey. We have adapted this framework to help researchers and other education practitioners conceptualise how to review, synthesise, generate and communicate evidence in education. This framework facilitates a questions ‐ to ‐ methods approach in our journey to evidence, dissolving the idea that some research and analysis methods are superior to others. We argue that this evidence building framework can help us to distinguish between key terms in education, such as evidence ‐ informed and evidence ‐ based practice, as well as teacher enquiry and research —helping to distinguish the roles of researchers and practitioners. This paper has direct relevance to informing how we build evidence in education and identifies a need for collaboration as we work towards an evidence‐based teaching profession.