Educación ambiental

Although the first P4C project reports are considered untrustworthy, ensuing evidence sheds some light on the effectiveness of the programme. Trickey and Topping (2004) conducted a systematic literature review and they included ten studies of which eight reported a positive impact of the programme on different cognitive and non-cognitive skills and two provided insufficient data for conclusions to be drawn. However, this systematic literature review was published in 2004 including the studies published until 2002, more than fifteen years ago. However, curriculum reform might take place approximately every ten years (Sargent et al., 2010). Consequently, it is likely that education reforms might have occurred and this positive impact might not still be applicable in recent studies.

The same year a meta-analysis which evaluated P4C was published by Garcia- Moriyón, Rebollo and Colom (2004). The meta-analysis focused on studies which evaluated the impact on reasoning skills and included 18 studies. The authors recognised that 17 of the studies reported positive effect sizes. However, they also recognised that there might be publication bias and studies reporting positive results of

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a programme are more likely to be published. This means that they did cover a holistic and multi-dimensional examination of the topic. Additionally, the meta-analysis by Garcia-Moriyón et al. (2004) focused on studies which examined the impact of P4C only on reasoning skills. Since 2004, however, many studies have been published which examine the effectiveness of the programme.

There is a recent meta-analysis by Yan (2017), but it is currently under an embargo. I could only access its abstract. The abstract of the study suggested that studies published from 2002 to 2016 show medium effect sizes for the programme in different areas, and big positive effect size for reasoning skills.

There are some studies examining to what extent P4C is a joyful experience for students and teachers. Some examples are worth analysing since they have some similar characteristics. In general, the students appear to provide positive feedback concerning their participation in P4C sessions. Research in Northern Ireland investigated the perceptions of 364 students and 19 teachers who participated in a sub- category of P4C and suggests that students enjoyed participating in P4C sessions (Dunlop, Compton, Clarke & McKelvey-Martin, 2015). It is worth noting that the interviews conducted with 16 teenagers in Greece after P4C sessions also assigned positive feedback (Gasparatou & Ergazaki, 2015). When students were asked what they enjoyed more, they mentioned the lack of the demand for providing right answers. P4C sessions are based on the notion that there is no right or wrong answer. This is one of the central beliefs that educators and students have about P4C sessions, but it is not warranted. ‘Some answers are simply and plainly wrong, some are better than others’ (Gazzard, 2012, p. 52). Learning this is part of what philosophy is.

What is more, these studies were sometimes weakly designed. What I found intriguing in one of these studies (Reznitskaya & Glina, 2013) was the fact that the researchers decided to examine the opinions of participants in P4C by conducting an experimental trial and having a comparison group. There was also randomisation within the groups. It is odd that the researchers chose this experimental research design since this design does not fit the research question. It seems that in the interviews the researchers included questions highly-related to the content of the intervention. For instance, the students who participated in P4C sessions mentioned that they liked the disagreement during dialogue. It is not surprising that this is less commonly mentioned by students with regular classes, as it is a basic element of a P4C intervention.

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To sum up, this category of studies remains only on a superficial level of whether P4C can ‘entertain’. Consequently, there is no apparent reason why this research question is repeatedly examined and why there are so many replications studies examining the same research question. The problematic element is that several of these studies involve just a few sessions and students’ interest and engagement are expectedly retained. I assert that a study, which asks the participants whether they enjoyed an intervention and whether they felt engaged, should adopt a longitudinal approach covering a considerable amount of P4C sessions to verify whether engagement and interest are retained. The studies which examine whether the students enjoy P4C sessions ask the participants to be engaged in sessions and teachers to offer didactic time and energy for their implementation.

I expect that educational research should offer informative results for the public and the policy. I argue that replicating studies with this research design to examine the enjoyment of the students does not respect the time of their participants. This is due to the fact that there are already too many studies suggesting that short P4C interventions are enjoyable. I consider it a loss of time to replicate more studies to verify that the students like a change in their routine by participating in a few P4C sessions. For future studies interested in finding out how enjoyable P4C sessions are for the students, I recommended to scrutinise the interest in sessions with a longitudinal design following the same cohort for years.