Andrew Davis, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Education, Durham University, UK
Here are a few basic questions to ask when seeking to make teaching more research-informed. I hope to show that there are no easy answers and that this is precisely why the questions are important. Sometimes it is claimed that strategies such as organising pupils in groups, learning by discovery, Rosenshine’s teaching principles (2012) or direct instruction have a significant ‘effect size’. Research is said to demonstrate that pupils targeted with a given approach achieve more than those without it. It apparently has an effect in some places. Now we wonder whether it has in ours. It is vital to ask exactly what any given strategy amounts to. Consider students sitting in rows. This may well seem perfectly clear. Either they are sitting in rows or they are not. Yet there are a number of variables that surely will make a difference here, and we need no lessons from research to convince us. Here
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