Category: Effective Teaching Approach

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Achievement Effective Teaching Approach Secondary School Education

Teacher/parent communication an effective tool to help students succeed

A study from Harvard and Brown Universities shows that struggling students did better in school when their teachers communicated with their parents regularly, and suggested specific actions students could do to improve their grades.

Researchers studied the effects of teacher/parent communication on the academic achievement of 435 struggling high school students enrolled in summer school to recover lost credits in English, history, math, or science two hours a day during a five-week program. Students were mostly Hispanic and African-American, and all were low-income. All students had to have been absent less than 30 days and to have received an “F+” in up to two courses. Students’ parents were randomly divided into three groups: the first group received a short weekly message from the teacher by phone, text, or email about what their child was doing well (positive); the second received a weekly teacher’s message about areas where their child needed improvement (improvement); and the third received no teacher message at all (control). The results showed:

  • At the end of the term, students whose parents had received messages from their teachers were 41% more likely to pass their classes than the control group who received no messages. Researchers noted that this was due to larger dropout rates in the control group.
  • Students whose parents received messages about areas for improvement passed their classes at a higher score than the group who received messages about what students were doing well.
  • A participant survey at the end of the study shows that the parent-student teams in the “improvement” and “positive” groups communicated about schoolwork with the same frequency, but the conversational content differed in that the improvement-group teams discussed areas where the students needed to do better, something the positive teams were less likely to do and a factor the researchers cite as a possible reason for the improvement students’ higher scores.

The study was performed as part of a series of low-cost school-improvement strategies.

 

Source (Open Access): Kraft, M.A., & Rogers, A. (2014). The underutilized potential of teacher-to-parent communication: evidence from a field experiment – HKS faculty research working paper series. Retrieved from http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mkraft/files/kraft_rogers_teacher-parent_communication_hks_working_paper.pdf… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Kindergarten Language Development

Effects of shared book reading for young ELL children

A meta-analysis, published in Review of Educational Research, examines how shared book reading affects the English language and literacy skills of young English Language Learners (ELLs).

Shared book reading involves an adult reading with one or more children, and is considered to be an effective practice for language and literacy development. It may also involve interactive practices such as dialogic reading techniques to engage children or reinforce specific ideas or words from the text.

For this meta-analysis, Lisa Fitton and colleagues identified 54 studies of shared reading interventions conducted in the U.S. that met their inclusion criteria. The total number of participants across the studies was 3,989, with an average age of six.

Results revealed that:

  • There is an overall positive effect of shared reading on ELL outcomes (effect size = +0.28).
  • Children’s developmental status moderated this effect, with larger effect sizes found in studies including only typically developing children (+0.48) than in studies including only participants with developmental disorders (+0.17).

The authors recommended further research with attention to detailed reporting and rigorous research methodology on shared reading to identify other moderators, including intervention characteristics.

 

Source: Fitton, L., McIlraith, A. L., & Wood, C. L. (2018). Shared book reading interventions with English learners: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 88(5), 712–751.… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Kindergarten Primary School Education Secondary School Education

Simple ways to improve learning

An article published by the Association for Psychological Science argues that educational outcomes can be improved by helping pupils to better regulate their own learning. The authors discuss ten techniques that might help them to do this. The techniques were selected on the grounds that they should be relatively easy to implement, and the article itself gives a clear review of each technique. The authors looked at all of the available evidence for each technique, and considered how easily the technique could be rolled out in different contexts, issues for implementation, and an overall assessment of its utility – low, moderate, or high.

The authors gave two techniques an overall high rating since they benefited learners of different ages and abilities, and were able to boost performance across many tasks and educational contexts:

  • The first of these was “practice testing”, which is usually self-testing outside the classroom.
  • The second was “distributed practice”, essentially the opposite of “cramming”, where study activities are spread over a single session or across multiple sessions.

Some of the techniques with low- or moderate-utility ratings also showed promise, but there was insufficient evidence for a higher rating. The techniques with moderate-utilitiy rating included elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice.

 

Source: Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Kindergarten Primary School Education Secondary School Education

Unpacking the evidence on cognitive load theory

Cognitive load theory – the theory of how the human brain learns and stores knowledge – is supported by a number of randomised controlled trials and has significant implications for teaching practice.  A report from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation in New South Wales, Australia, examines the existing research on cognitive load theory and what it looks like in practice. The first part of the report explains how human brains learn according to cognitive load theory, and outlines the evidence base for the theory. The second part examines the implication of cognitive load theory for teaching practice and describes some recommendations that are directly transferable to the classroom. These include:

  • Worked example effect– pupils are shown a problem that has already been solved (a “worked example”), with every step fully explained and clearly shown. Pupils who are taught using lots of worked examples learn more quickly than pupils who are asked to solve the problems themselves.
  • Modality effect– evidence suggests that working memory can be sub-divided into auditory and visual streams, so presenting information using both these methods of communication can increase working memory capacity – for example, when using a diagram and text to explain something, the written text can be communicated in spoken form.

The full report also discussed implications of other effects such as “the redundancy effect” and “the split attention effect”. The authors suggested these evidence-backed recommendations could benefit educational practice, especially for teaching novice learners in ‘technical’ subjects like mathematics, science and technology.

 

Source: (Open Access): Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (2017). Cognitive load theory: Research that teachers really need to understand. Sydney: NSW Department of Education. … Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Language Development Primary School Education

New guide to foundational reading skills

A What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide focuses on the foundational reading skills that enable students to read words, relate those words to their oral language, and read connected text with sufficient accuracy and fluency to understand what they read.

The authors conducted a thorough literature search, identified studies that met protocol requirements, and then reviewed those studies against WWC standards. The review focused on studies published since 2000. The guide, Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade, provides four recommendations that can be used to improve literacy skills from kindergarten to third grade (Years 1–4). Each recommendation is assigned a level of evidence based on the quantity and quality of the research:

  • Teach students academic language skills, including the use of inferential and narrative language, and vocabulary knowledge (minimal evidence)
  • Develop awareness of the segments of sounds in speech and how they link to letters (strong evidence)
  • Teach students to decode words, analyse word parts, and write and recognise words (strong evidence)
  • Ensure that each student reads connected text every day to support reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension (moderate evidence)

The practice guide is a companion to another WWC practice guide, Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade.

 

Source (Open Access): Foorman, B., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C. A., Dimino, J., … Wissel, S. (2016). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade (NCEE 2016-4008). Washington, DC: The What Works Clearinghouse.… Read the rest

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Effective Teaching Approach Kindergarten Language Development Maths and Science Learning

Fostering curiosity can promote academic achievement

A new research article by Prachi Shah and colleagues at the University of Michigan shows that children who are curious have higher academic achievement than those who aren’t. In fact, they see cultivating curiosity in the classroom—promoting the joy of discovery and motivating students to find out answers to life’s questions—as an untapped strategy for early academic success.

Researchers used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which has tracked a national representation of thousands of children since 2001. Children were followed via parent interviews and assessing the children at ages 9 months, 2 years, starting pre-K and K, and then looking at the reading, math, and behavioral skills of 6,200 of these children in 2006 and 2007 when they were in kindergarten.

Results showed that:

  • After controlling for other factors that might influence academic achievement, eagerness to learn new things had a small but positive influence on kindergartners’ reading (ES=+0.11) and math (+0.12).
  • This was even more so for children from low SES backgrounds (ES=+0.18 in reading, +0.20 in math).

The authors conclude that while effortful control has been emphasized as an important predictor for early achievement, curiosity is also an important, yet under-recognized contributor.

 

Source: Shah, P. E., Weeks, H. M., Richards, B., & Kaciroti, N. (2018). Early childhood curiosity and kindergarten reading and math academic achievement. Pediatric Research, Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-018-0039-3… Read the rest