Review of Evidence-Based Policy Making
OECD (2012) advised all stakeholders to reduce online risks and provide a safer Internet environment. This recommendation obliges every stakeholder to provide a safer online environment for teenagers and young people. To provide effective protection, it is important to implement a youth protection policy at every level of government and in the private sector and educational organizations. Without clear role definitions, it will be challenging to implement a concrete protection policy.
The most effective way to solve these problems is to think about each problem separately, clarifying the political tasks each sector should deal with. One tactic that can help to achieve this is to adopt an Evidence-Based Policy (EBP).
An EBP is an approach derived from Evidence-Based Medicine proposed by Gordon Guyatt at Manchester University in Canada (Tsutani, 2000). EBP is used in areas such as social policy, educational policy, and welfare policy (Sowaki, 2010). The OECD (2007) has argued that EBP-based policy making enables people and organizations to choose clear and straightforward evidence from among many options. EBP has been widely adopted in various policy areas for evidence-based policymaking.
Nishimura (2005) indicated that evidence should be based on “objective and politically neutral statistical indicators.” Such evidence would gain public understanding and help to establish trust between the government and society (OECD, 2004). Additionally, the OECD (2012) has emphasized the need to set indicators as metrics of the evidence, allowing people to visualize the actual condition of each political area.
From these discussions, it seems clear that EBM can be effective in supporting rational decision making for effective educational policy implementation. One key measure to promote the policy will involve establishing an indicator to evaluate the evidence.