Heather L. Schwartz and colleagues from the RAND Corporation have released a final report on a six-year study of the National Summer Learning Project, an initiative from The Wallace Foundation that was implemented in 2011 in five urban school districts. The summer programs in these districts were district-led, voluntary summer learning programs that featured both academic instruction and enrichment opportunities to improve outcomes for low-income students. The overall study combined a randomized controlled trial with correlational analysis and implementation research to examine whether voluntary, district-run summer learning programs can improve academic, behavioral, and social and emotional outcomes for low-income, urban youth in both the short and long terms. The study followed approximately 5,600 students from third to seventh grade. Data included surveys, observations, and test data. Findings showed that students who received a minimum of 25 hours of mathematics instruction in a summer performed better on the subsequent state math test, and...

An evaluation of the Education Endowment Foundation’s trial of Families and Schools Together (FAST) in the UK, delivered by Save the Children, did not appear to make a difference in children’s achievement, but was found to be an effective mechanism for engaging parents in their children’s early education. FAST was also shown to have a positive impact on children’s social and behavioral outcomes across the whole grade level and not just the children who participated in the program. FAST is a parental engagement program that aims to support parenting and enhance links between families, schools, and the community. Parents and their children attend eight weekly two-and-a-half-hour group sessions delivered after school by accredited FAST trainers. The school-level randomized trial measured the impact of FAST for the whole grade level on Key Stage 1 (a standardized assessment of achievement in the UK) reading and arithmetic achievement, and children’s behavioral and prosocial outcomes...

Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada conducted a meta-analysis on research that investigated learning outcomes for students who received self-explanation prompts while studying or solving problems. Self-explanation is a process by which students use prior knowledge to make inferences in order to fill in missing information or monitor understanding. Their study, published in Educational Psychological Review, examined 69 independent effect sizes from 64 studies (5,917 participants). Studies had to include a treatment condition in which learners were directed or prompted to self-explain during a learning task, with a comparison treatment where learners were directed not to self-explain. The measure was a cognitive outcome such as problem solving or comprehension. Learning activities were mostly of short duration (less than an hour) and carried out with undergraduate students. The analysis found that: There was a positive overall weighted mean effect size on learning outcomes for students who were prompted to self-explain compared...

A study published in Economics of Education Review looks at the evidence from the extended school day (ESD) program in Florida to determine whether students benefit from longer school days. In 2012, Florida introduced the ESD program, increasing the length of the school day by an hour in the lowest-performing elementary schools in order to provide additional reading lessons. The lessons had to be based on research, adapted for student ability, and include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Schools were selected using school-level reading accountability measures. For this study, David Figlio and colleagues looked at reading scores for all students in Florida between grades 3 and 10 using school administrative data from 2005–06 and 2012–13, and employed a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of lengthening the school day, looking at the different performance of schools either side of the cut-off point. Results indicated that: The additional one hour of...

While many studies show positive effects of cooperative learning on student achievement, a recent study examined the effects of cooperative learning on reducing bullying in middle school. A total of 15 rural schools (n=1,460 seventh graders) in the Pacific Northwest were matched based on size and free-lunch percentage, and then seventh graders were randomly assigned to either receive a cooperative learning program (n=792) or to continue business as usual (n=668). The cooperative learning program used techniques by Johnson ,Johnson & Holubec (2013) , incorporating peer tutoring, collaborative reading, and methods where classmates rely on each other to learn new information while being held individually accountable for what they have learned. The theory behind this study was that in cooperative groups, bullies would not be reinforced by their peers to continue bullying, and socially isolated students would have opportunities to interact with others more and make new friends. All participating teachers received a...

Published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Martin Hassler and colleagues carried out a randomized controlled trial of a mathematics intervention on tablets (iPads). The trial involved 283 low-performing second graders spread across 27 urban schools in Sweden. The children were randomized to four groups as follows: A group participated in a math intervention called Chasing Planets, consisting of 261 planets on a space map, each with a unique math exercise (addition or subtraction up to 12). Students practiced for 20 minutes a day.A group participated in the math intervention combined with working memory training, where students spent an additional 10 minutes each day on working memory tasks.A placebo group who practiced mostly reading tasks on the tablet (again for 20 minutes each day), including Chasing Planets-Reading, which had a similar format to the math intervention.A control group who received no intervention, not even on improving their skills on the tablets. The intervention lasted...

An article published in Educational Research Review has examined the effects of self-assessment on self-regulated learning (SRL) and self-efficacy by conducting four meta-analyses. To understand the impact of students’ assessing their own work, Ernesto Panadero and colleagues from Spain analyzed 19 studies comprised of 2,305 students from primary schools to higher education. The meta-analyses only included studies published in English that contained empirical results of self-assessment intervention in relation to SRL and/or self-efficacy, had at least one control group, and had been peer-reviewed. The findings indicated that: Self-assessment had a positive effect on SRL strategies serving a positive self-regulatory function for students’ learning, such as meta-cognitive strategies (ES= +0.23)Self-assessment had a negative effect on “Negative SRL”, which is associated with negative emotions and stress and is thought to be adverse to students’ learning. (ES =-0.65)Self-assessment was also found positively associated with SRL even when SRL was measured qualitatively (ES= +0.43)Self-assessment had...

A systematic review in the Educational Research Review has analyzed the evidence on prerequisites for implementing Assessment for Learning(AfL) in classroom practice. The aim was not to provide a “recipe for success,”but to generate a better understanding of what needs to be considered. A total of 25 studies met the inclusion criteria. Of these, nine were conducted in the context of primary education, ten in secondary, and six covered both. The results included data from eleven different countries, but most of the studies were conducted in the US (n = 9). The authors found that: The knowledge, skills, and attitudes of individual teachers influenced the establishment of an AfL-based learning environment. Pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge had an impact on a teacher’s ability to provide students with accurate and complete feedback. They also needed to have the ability to foster the participation of students in discussions about their answers, and construct questions that drew out...

In the RAND Corporation report “New Assessments, Better Instruction?Designing Assessment Systems to Promote Instructional Improvement.”,researchers conducted a series of literature reviews that focused on topics such as high-stakes testing, performance assessment, and formative evaluation. Their findings suggest that there are a wide variety of effects that testing might have on teachers’ activities in the classroom, including changes in curriculum content and emphasis (e.g., changes in the sequence of topics, reallocation of emphasis across and within topics); changes in how teachers allocate time and resources across different pedagogical activities (e.g.,focusing on test preparation); and changes in how teachers interact with individual students (e.g., using test results to individualize instruction). The report also identifies a number of factors (e.g., student characteristics and district and school policies) that mediate the relationship between assessment and instructional practices. The authors suggest that the role of tests would be enhanced by policies that ensure tests mirror...