Introduction: Evidence and public good in educational policy, research, and practice

The demands about the quality and relevance of educational research to inform the policy and practice have been growing over the past decade in response to the evidence-based education movement; however, the literature is yet to tackle the question of the interrelationships between evidence, research, policy, and practice in education for the public good in an international context. In this introductory chapter, the authors first explore the literature on the evidence-based and evidence--informed education movements and then introduce a new term, evidence-free, that is, actions of some policymakers who disregard or misuse evidence for their own agenda. Furthermore, the authors provide several guiding questions of the edited work and explore the implications of the contributions in the book for further research and theory development alongside policy implications. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.