Transcript Getting more bang for your buck – the education

Getting more
bang for your buck –
the education interventions
that really work
Robert Coe
Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring, Durham University
Schools North East Summit, 14 Oct 2011
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Toolkit of Strategies to Improve
Learning
www.suttontrust.com
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Why we wrote it
Best buys
Worst buys
Learning
How might we use
this?
The pupil premium
 Aims:
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to reduce the attainment gap between the
highest and lowest achieving pupils nationally
to increase social mobility
to enable more pupils from disadvantaged
backgrounds to get to the top Universities
to provide additional resource to schools to do
this
 Estimates of £430/ pupil on fsm in 2011-12;
rising to £1750 in 2014-15?
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The question
How should a school
spend any ‘discretionary’
budget to achieve
maximum benefits in
learning?
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Before we started
 Advice to schools: Up to you to decide…
 Initial suggestions:
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Smaller classes
One to one tuition
 Does spending improve attainment?
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Mixed & complex findings from research
The Bananarama Principle: It ain’t what you do it’s
the way that you do it…
 Do we know some things that do work?
 Why have we failed to increase attainment
over 30 years?
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What we tried to do
 Summarise the evidence from meta-analysis
about the impact of different strategies on
learning (attainment).
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As found in research studies
These are averages
 Apply quality criteria to evaluations: rigorous
designs only
 Estimate the size of the effect
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Standardised Mean Difference = ‘Months of gain’
 Estimate the costs of adopting
o
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Information not always available
In the Toolkit
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Summaries
What is it?
How effective is it?
How secure is the
evidence?
What are the costs?
How applicable is it?
Further information
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Overview of value for money
Promising
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May be
worth it
Effect Size (months gain)
Feedback
Meta-cognitive
Pre-school
Peer tutoring
1-1 tutoring
Homework
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£0
Summer
schools
Parental
AfL
involvement
Learning Individualised
Sports
learning
styles
Arts
Performance
Ability grouping
pay
Cost per pupil
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ICT
Smaller
classes
After
school
Not
worth it
£1000
Teaching
assistants
Key messages
 Some things that are popular or widely
thought to be effective are probably not
worth doing
o
Ability grouping (setting); After-school clubs;
Teaching assistants; Smaller classes;
Performance pay
 Some things look ‘promising’
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Effective feedback; Meta-cognitive and self
regulation strategies; Peer
tutoring/peer‐assisted learning strategies;
Homework
Focus on learning
 Does your ‘theory of learning’ explain why
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ability grouping (setting)
after-school clubs
teaching assistants
smaller classes
performance pay
do not work (or are not cost effective)?
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Do we care about learning?
 Which of the following are evidence of learning?
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Students are busy: lots of work is done
Students are engaged, interested, motivated
Classroom is ordered, calm, under control
 What do school students value most?
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Social interactions & status with peers
Keeping out of trouble
Pleasing teachers: good marks, neat writing, polite
Thinking hard about really challenging problems
Questions about learning
 Learning is invisible.
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How can you know what your students are
learning?
What tools do you use to make learning
visible?
What kind of tools do you need?
 How often do students need to think hard?
 Do teachers in your school really prioritise
learning? Do students?
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Feedback
“… we have each been
asked several times by
teachers, ‘What makes for
good feedback?’—a question
to which, at first, we had no
good answer. Over the
course of two or three years,
we have evolved a simple
answer—good feedback
causes thinking.”
(Black & Wiliam, 2003)
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If you want your students to
learn something difficult …
 You need to know how
many of them have ‘got it’
 They need to know
whether they have ‘got it’
 If they haven’t, you need
to be able to do something
about it
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Meta-cognitive and self
regulation strategies
 Teaching approaches which make learners’
thinking about learning more explicit in the
classroom.
 Eg teaching pupils strategies to plan, monitor
and evaluate their own learning.
 It is usually more effective in small groups so
learners can support each other and make
their thinking explicit through discussion.
 Self-regulation refers to managing one’s own
motivation towards learning as well as the
more cognitive aspects of thinking and
reasoning.
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Peer tutoring/ peer-assisted
learning strategies
 Learners work in pairs or small groups to provide
each other with explicit teaching support. The
learners take on responsibility for aspects of
teaching and for evaluating the success of their
peers.
o
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Cross-Age Tutoring an older learner usually takes the
tutoring role and is paired with a younger tutee or
tutees.
Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) is a
structured approach for mathematics and reading
requiring set periods of time for implementation of
about 25-35 minutes 2 or 3 times a week.
Reciprocal Peer Tutoring: learners alternate between
the role of tutor and tutee.
Is that it?
Have we solved
the problem of how
to improve
attainment?
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Implementation
 These strategies have been shown to be costeffective in research studies
 But when we have tried to implement evidencebased strategies we have not seen system-wide
improvement
 We don’t know how to get schools/teachers who are
not currently doing them to do so in ways that are
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True to the key principles
Feasible in real classrooms – with all their constraints
Scalable & replicable
Sustainable
Some things we could try
 Peer tutoring (seems to be hard to
implement badly)
 Do proper professional development
 Teacher Learning Communities
 Comprehensive School Reform
 Constant evaluation (with feedback)
 Feedback to teachers that is targeted,
intensive & supported
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 Let’s not flat-line for another 30 years
 Let’s develop strategies that
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Are aligned with evidence about likely costeffectiveness and learning theory
Are feasible, scalable, sustainable
Can (& will) be robustly evaluated, so we will
know whether they have worked, and can
optimise
 [email protected]
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