The question if teachers’ action is evidence-based, thus based upon existing empirical findings, or if their decisions are mostly based upon their everyday knowledge and experience, has regained the interest of international empirical research during the least years (van Buer & Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, 2006). The concept of evidence-based governance is tied to the expectation that teachers use sufficiently empirically proven knowledge for planning lessons and school development. Until today the main problem is that teachers usually do not draw consequences from evaluation data for their actions. Thus, advised developments of lessons and school are not being conducted based upon evidence (Kadach & Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, 2009). In this context the question arises how evidence-based action of teachers can be promoted by the heads of schools and especially which meaning and influence leadership gets. National and international school research showed that the headmaster is a role model for the teachers and that the headmaster’s action significantly influences the teachers’ action (Leithwoood & Riehl, 2003; Huber, 2008). The existing empirical studies cannot state if this holds true for evidence-based action and how strong the headmaster’s influence on teachers’ evidence orientation is (van Ackeren et al., 2011).

In order to close this research gap, the huge, interdisciplinary research project ‘A Multilevel Approach to Evidence-based Practice in the Educational System - Conditions, Processes and Effects’ (EviS) has been funded since October 2010. It is being funded for three years and is part of the new research focus „Educational Governance“ (project number: 01JG1010A; http://www.empirische-bildungsforschung-bmbf.de/zeigen_e.html?seite=8835) by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

In this context a longitudinal survey was conducted in 2011, during which 2.651 teachers and 286 headmasters from 157 schools of all types were surveyed amongst others regarding their evidence-based knowledge and action. During this speech first results will be presented. On the one hand we will see how the headmaster’s influence can be integrated and modeled to the concept of evidence-based governance on a theoretical scale. On the other hand we will look at the hypothesis that the action of headmasters has an important influence on the evidence-based action of teachers.

Approaches from different research disciplines are being tied in with for developing a theoretical model on the influence of a headmaster’s action on evidence-based action among teachers. English and German research in the field of evidence-based management (Dormann & Dormann, 2010; Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006) has to be mentioned.

From a research perspective the results from the EviS project offer a suitable connectivity to the international state of research. From a school-practical perspective they also offer a multitude of insights and connectivity with regard to evidence-based school governance and questions on quality development. Last but not least, from the perspective of European education policy they give important impetus. The concept of evidence-based governance has consequently been followed suit in the EU countries for some years now and the international political balance clearly shows that surveys like EviS are indispensable for a goal-oriented and successful educational governance (OECD, 2007; Pont, Nusche, & Moorman, 2008).

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