An independent evaluation in the UK of Stop and Think: Learning Counterintuitive Concepts has found evidence of a positive impact in math and science outcomes for students in Key Stage 2 . The Learning Counterintuitive Concepts project, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation and Wellcome, aimed to improve science and math achievement for Year 3 (7-8 year olds) and Year 5 (9-10 year olds) using an intervention called Stop and Think. When learning new concepts in science and math, students must be able to inhibit prior contradictory knowledge and misconceptions to acquire new knowledge successfully. Stop and Think is a computer-assisted learning activity that aims to improve a learner’s ability to adapt to counterintuitive concepts by training them to inhibit their initial response, and instead, give a slower and more reflective answer. The randomized controlled trial involved 6,672 children from 89 schools across England. The intervention was delivered to the whole class...

Teachers’ expectations are believed to affect students, but teacher expectation intervention studies that compare an intervention group to a control group are rare. A recent study published in Learning and Individual Differences investigated the effects of an intervention in China that enhanced teachers’ behaviour of conveying high expectations to students. The study randomly selected two schools in the urban area of a city in south China. Four Grade 8 English teachers in each school were randomly chosen and evenly allocated to either the intervention or control group. While the control group teachers did not receive training, the intervention group teachers were provided with training workshops focusing on three strands of high expectation behaviour, namely, giving students challenging tasks, providing affirmation or suggestions to students about their performance, and enhancing how teachers impart personal regard to students.  Teachers were asked to estimate the final exam score they believed each student would achieve for...

The Education Endowment Foundation in the UK has published an evaluation of Digital Feedback in Primary Maths, a program that aims to improve primary school teachers’ feedback to students. The intervention uses a tablet application called Explain Everything, diagnostic assessments, and training on effective feedback. The app allows teachers to provide students with digitally recorded feedback on a tablet, rather than written feedback. Students have the opportunity to review their feedback and develop their work further. By improving teachers’ diagnostic and feedback skills when teaching math in primary schools, the intervention aims to ultimately improve student outcomes in math. To estimate the impact of Digital Feedback on math achievement, the evaluation used a randomized controlled trial involving 2,564 students in 108 classes across 34 English primary schools. While the intervention took place in each school, classrooms were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group, which carried on with business-as-usual teaching. The...

A study published in AERA Open looks at the long-term effects of the INSIGHTS program – a social-emotional learning intervention that supports children’s ability to self-regulate by enhancing their attention and behavior management. Between 2008 and 2012, a total of 22 elementary schools from three New York City school districts were randomly assigned to participate in the INSIGHTS program or to an attention-control condition (an after-school reading program). A previous study found that the INSIGHTS program reduced children’s disruptive behavior and increased behavioral engagement by the end of first grade. This study uses administrative data for those students to examine whether receiving the intervention in kindergarten and first grade had any impact on provision of special education services or grade retention by the end of fifth grade. The study also considers whether impacts varied for low- versus high-income students. The findings suggest that: Students in the INSIGHTS program were less likely to receive special education services between kindergarten...

An article recently published in Frontiers in Psychology reported how technology is used to facilitate personalized learning in China. Xiaofeng You and colleagues examined the Chinese Learning Diagnosis System (CLDS) developed by a Chinese educational evaluation company designed for providing timely feedback to students and teachers.  The CLDS analyzes students’ assignments for their mastery of various attributes and generates feedback to students and teachers. Consequently, students can identify their strengths and weakness and teachers can modify their instruction using the information. To examine the CLDS’s effectiveness, the achievements, self-efficacy, and academic motivation of 547 high school students enrolled in an experimental school in 2012 were compared to 396 high school students in a school where CLDS was not used. Achievement in the pretest was measured by high school entrance examination scores, and achievement in the posttest 3 years later was measured by the college entrance examination scores; both are high stakes tests...

A randomized controlled trial published in the journal Nature has found that a short, online, self-administered growth mindset intervention may improve achievement among lower-achieving students and increase overall enrollment in advanced math courses. The study, conducted by David S. Yeager and colleagues, was the largest ever randomized controlled trial of growth mindset in U.S. schools, with 12,000 ninth graders in 65 schools involved. Students were individually randomized to either a control or intervention group. The intervention group was asked to complete two 25-minute online courses, taken three weeks apart. Students were given information about how the brain works and the latest research on growth mindset, then they completed activities such as explaining what they had learned from the course to students in the year below. Students in the control group were given a similar program with information on how the brain worked, but no information on growth mindset. Following the intervention, students' grade point average (GPA)...

In recent years, interventions that apply positive psychology principles have become increasingly popular, providing an alternative approach to promoting students’ well-being. A recent research published in Frontiers in Psychology examined a positive education program in China focusing on positive emotion for middle school students” Participants were drawn from a public middle school in the city of Chengdu, China. A total of 173 eighth graders from six classes participated in this study, of which 84 were randomly allocated to the experiment group, and 89 were assigned in the control group. Students in the experiment group received a 10-session positive education program delivered by their head-teachers who received training in positive psychology from the researchers. The program consisted of three main modules, namely understanding emotions, fostering positive emotions and managing negative emotions. Each session lasted 45 minutes. Students in the control group spent the same time taking a moral education class that...

The Ministry of Education in France instituted a policy in 2002 that reduced class size to no more than 12 students in areas determined to have social difficulties and high proportions of at-risk students, called Zones d’Education Prioritaire (ZEP). In order to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of this policy, researcher Jean Ecalle and colleagues in France examined the results of the policy-mandated class size reduction on the reading achievement of first graders (Study 1), and compared them to the effects of an evidence-based literacy intervention on the reading achievement of at-risk children in regularly sized classes (20 students) (Study 2). Study 1, reducing class size, involved assigning classrooms to either small (12 students/class n=100 classes) or large (20-25 students/class, n=100 classes) class sizes (with the support of the Ministry). At the start of the 2002-03 school year, 1,095 children were pretested on pre-reading skills and matched at pretest. In Study 2,...

QuickSmart Numeracy is a 30-week math tutoring program from Australia that uses teaching assistants as tutors. Its goal is to increase basic math fact automaticity/fluency in students in Year 4 and Year 8 who perform in the bottom third of their national cohort as measured on standardized testing, the premise being that increased math fluency allows students to devote their concentration to math concepts instead of fact recall. Researchers from the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia, recently examined the effects of the program on student achievement in a randomized controlled trial. Subjects were 288 Year 4 and Year 8 students from 70 classrooms in 23 Sydney Catholic Schools in New South Wales who scored below the bottom 30th percentile on national standardized testing. Baseline testing was done in March 2017 using the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Progressive Achievement...