Context, mechanism, outcome: How one primary school evaluated the efficacy of teaching strategies in a knowledge-rich curriculum

In 2018, we introduced Impact readers to our initial work designing and implementing a knowledge-rich curriculum at Cottenham Primary School (CPS) (Dennis and Kilsby, 2018). At that time, we were focused on striking a balance between teachers’ subject knowledge and the pedagogies that best support retention across primary domains. We recognised that ‘the next phase of our research will necessarily include children’s progress as a means of addressing the “so what?” questions that emerge from a curriculum overhaul’ (p. 23). In this article, we share the process we’ve developed for evaluating the impact of the knowledge-rich curriculum and how we studied whether specific cognitive teaching practices supported children’s learning across domains. The challenge of curricular efficacy The challenge of being able to talk with authenticity and authority about the efficacy of our curriculum required us to revisit how we define the curriculum at CPS, and to then enshrine what we