For four years I have taught in a wide variety of schools and I have always been confused about how we use the word ‘validity’. I knew the word had something to do with ‘goodness’, but goodness of what? And how could I know what was good and what was not? That is what motivated […]
Feedback seems extremely powerful. It is ‘among the most common features of successful teaching and learning’ with an average effect size of 0.79, ‘twice the average effect of all other schooling effects’ (Hattie, 2012: pp.115-116). Such meta-analyses are problematic (see, for example, Wiliam, 2016) and more recent reviews have offered lower effect sizes, but the […]
The issue that teachers face Questions are an integral part of classroom life and essential to every teacher’s pedagogical repertoire. They are also one of the elements of effective formative assessment (Black et al., 2003). Questioning serves many purposes: it engages students in the learning process and provides opportunities for students to ask questions themselves. […]
Assessment for learning (AfL) strategies, closely associated with formative assessment, aim to enable students to independently assess their own learning, moving towards increasing autonomy as learners (Swaffield, 2011), and can be extremely powerful. However, as educational researcher Sue Swaffield, a former teacher, points out, they can also be confused, and the true potential […]
My title comes from a comment made by a teacher who attended the first development day for the Teacher Assessment in Primary Science (TAPS) project, an ongoing research programme funded by the Primary Science Teaching Trust and based at Bath Spa University, which develops support for teacher assessment by working collaboratively with teachers. This teacher […]
One of the proposals in the Department for Education’s (DfE) recent consultation on primary assessment is to introduce a school-entry assessment to act as a baseline for measuring progress across the primary phase and use this as part of the accountability system. This would enable progress across seven years of schooling to be taken into […]
Teachers should be able to meet the demands of the classroom; in the language of teaching quality research, they should have the required ‘competences’ to be effective. But what are these competences, and can they be assessed accurately? This article explores some possible approaches and challenges in defining these competences and in assessing against them […]
I had some concerns about the marking system used for Key Stage 3 in my school when I joined two years ago. It followed the general policy that classwork would be marked every two weeks and pieces graded from E* to 3. Approximate proportions were set for each grade, so one or two students might […]
The EEF looks at how better evidence could help to reduce teacher workload. The Education Endowment Foundation is an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational attainment. It funds rigorous evaluations of teaching and learning strategies that aim to raise pupils’ attainment. Their aim is to find out what is most […]
When the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Oxford University Department of Education released the report A Marked Improvement (Elliott et al., 2016), summarising and reviewing the evidence we have on effective marking practices, I started reading with alacrity. Given the implications of marking for teacher workload, and yet the importance of effective feedback for […]
Administrations worldwide are seeing assessment as a policy tool to achieve educational aims and objectives. The outcomes of public examinations are increasingly viewed not only as important for individual learners – to enable them to access the labour market and further educational opportunities – but as a means of pursuing a series of aims, including […]
Continuing professional development (CPD) is an important way of spreading evidence-informed practice (EIP) in schools. But despite widespread calls for more for teachers, most forms of CPD do not work. A review by Yoon et al. (2008) found 20 effect sizes reported from studies capable of identifying causal impacts, eight of which showed an effect […]
This is a co-publication with the British Medical Journal (BMJ), first published in May 2017 (BMJ 357: J2234) Education and healthcare intersect in important ways, paving the way for exciting cross-sector collaborations. Critical thinking – the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe – is an essential skill […]
The need to define a set of ‘big ideas’ as a framework for decisions about the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment originated in the context of science education. For many years there had been calls for greater depth and less uncoordinated breadth in this field. Multiple problems stemmed from the curriculum being overcrowded with content, allowing […]
Dominic Shibli discusses Kirschner and van Merriënboer’s paper debunking three popular ‘myths’ in educational research. I have been teaching for 20 years but it was only about 18 months ago that I discovered the work of Paul Kirschner when I read the paper ‘Do learners really know best? Urban legends in education’ by […]
As guest editor, I am delighted to welcome you to the interim issue of Impact. It is the first journal to be published under the umbrella of the Chartered College of Teaching, the newly opened professional membership body for the teaching profession. Whilst this interim issue does not yet represent what our fully established peer-reviewed […]
Simon Bayliss considers the impact of reading Jung-Sook Lee’s research on the factors that make a difference to students’ learning, behaviour and engagement with learning. Prior to becoming a teacher, I trained and worked as a paramedic within the NHS. Throughout my time as a paramedic, one rule was always paramount: engage with research. During […]
Four years after Ben Goldacre exhorted those of us working in the English education system to claim the prize of evidence (Goldacre, 2013), have we achieved his stated goal? Goldacre argued that both the teaching profession and student outcomes could be improved by, amongst other things, ‘establishing a culture where this evidence is used as […]
Stephen Lockyer delves into the world of cognitive science to explore what is known about strategies for improving memory retention. I was disappointed as a child that there wasn’t a GCSE in revision timetabling, as I was that pupil who spent a week making elaborate multi-coloured revision schedules, only to then ignore them and cram […]
Despite recent policies to support evidence-informed teaching, and a number of important practical developments – of which the new Chartered College of Teaching is one – we still don’t know a great deal about the current extent or depth of evidence-informed practice across schools in England. This paper presents findings from a survey co-developed by […]
