A More Scientific Approach to Improving Education

April 2, 2018 5:08 PM

The Education Endowment Foundation is a UK non-profit researching what works and what doesn't in public education, where students are the guinea pigs. Through its close ties with the UK government, the EEF tries to find evidence on best practices in education, then deliver the evidence to teachers. Studies range across the spectrum, from peer tutoring to summer schooling. The "yardstick" used to measure impact is how many "months forward" a student's education moves as a result of an education program, such as "outdoor adventure learning." The results are posted as "Evidence Summaries."

It turns out, teaching kids how to learn has a large positive impact on their performance in school. And one-to-one coaching and tutoring can in fact lead to 5 months' forward progress.

EEF has become the biggest funder of education research in the UK:

'The EEF was given two main jobs. First, it dished out cash to researchers with interesting ideas, becoming, on its creation, by far the biggest funder of schools research in the country.

'Its second job is to disseminate existing research. Its online “teaching and learning toolkit” summarises the findings of more than 13,000 trials from around the world, rating initiatives on the basis of their cost, the strength of the evidence behind them, and their impact, which is measured in the number of months by which they advance children’s learning. ...

'But the EEF has come to the realisation that the “passive presentation of evidence is not enough,” says Sir Kevan Collins, its boss. ... Thus the EEF is increasingly focused on working out how to change behaviour. “One thing we know”, says Sir Kevan, “is that teachers really trust other teachers.”

'The most ambitious shift is the recruitment of 23 “research schools”, of which Ash Grove is one. As a research school, it gets money to help around 150 other local schools, by putting on events to spread the latest research, training teachers and helping them to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom innovations. ... The EEF hopes that evidence will be more compelling when it comes from a friendly face."

posted by hexaflexagon (6 comments total)

The idea that one-on-one tutoring can improve educational outcomes (though obvious) has been extensively studied, and quantified going back at least to 1984.

Most educational reform / addition of technology since that time has focused on replicating those results without incurring the cost of 1:1 instruction. So far, results have not been promising.

In fact, as class sizes continue to grow (with spending in most cases growing more than proportionally), we haven't learned the right lessons. Hiring more teachers is almost always beneficial, and yet, it's often the last thing we try (and not even necessarily the most expensive option either).
posted by schmod at 7:25 PM on April 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

Hiring more teachers is almost always beneficial, and yet, it's often the last thing we try

Here in the UK I get the impression (from a lot of friends/acquaintances working in education) that schools are desperately trying to hire more teachers but they're leaving the profession in droves and there just aren't the funds for enough teachers anyway.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:34 AM on April 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Education in the UK, at least in the public sector, has been a prime example of the Tories' tendency to think that beating teachers with both the stick and the carrot is the best way to improve standards. Successive education ministers have systematically taken almost all decision-making ability away from teachers, left them under-resourced and underpaid, and buried the entire system under a blanket of paperwork and testing. And there's been a long tradition of Tories mistrusting teachers, who they consider to be irredeemable lefties, and appointing more trustworthy people 'from business' to managerial positions.

Anything that might have attracted the brightest and best to education has been flushed down the toilet. In the worst-performing schools, stress-related absences are an epidemic, and relatively few new teachers stick with the profession for more than a couple of years, which I find heartbreaking when I think about some of the talented and inspiring young graduates currently working with my kids.

Michael Gove, who launched the EEF when he was in charge of education, was and is a frustrating source of ideology and nonsense, whose occasional sensible thoughts seem to occur essentially at random. Teachers, by and large, came to loathe him. The drift of policy under Gove and others away from a broad education and towards what they consider to be commercially useful skills means that while Chinese students flock to the UK in droves because of the quality of our universities, Tory education ministers are looking at turning our primary schools into learning-by-rote education factories in the Chinese mould.

The best thing that could happen in the UK is for education to be largely divorced (and protected) from the remit of politicians and put into the hands of people who understand it. Bodies like the EEF can be a valuable part of this, but when they're feeding the results of their research back to government, good ideas are likely to be lost for purely ideological reasons, which is wasteful and a shame.
posted by pipeski at 3:41 AM on April 3, 2018 [10 favorites]

Thanks for this. At the school at which I'm a governor, we're doing interventions on both aspirations (though I don't think we mean quite the same as the EEF seems to) and in mastery (Shanghai Maths) so I'm interested in the EEF summaries of these.

I came across this review of the EEF's work on assessment last year and got interested in what the organisation's doing - having been surprised not to have come across it before despite my hanging around the fringes of education data for a few years now. There has been some criticism of them - see this TES article discussing the toolkit, and this thread on IFERI. I don't have either the statistical or educational expertise to understand if the criticisms in the thread are justified.

If people are interested in UK education research generally, there's also the National Foundation for Educational Research, the Nuffield Foundation's education research, the Scottish National Improvement Hub, the DfE's research publications, and some organisations with specific focusses such as the Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and Education and the Sutton Trust on social mobility.

There are some good researchers on Twitter too, such as tombennett71 and hgaldinoshea, who both work for ResearchED.
posted by paduasoy at 10:37 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'd love more 'learning to learn' types of activities, I think they're especially key.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 5:19 AM on April 4, 2018

The What Works Clearingouse is part of the US Department of Education and has a similar mission of reviewing research in Education. It is a woefully underused resource. Maybe they could learn from the EEF's information dissemination efforts.
posted by nixxon at 12:07 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]