Researchers at the Institute of Education at University College London have conducted a study that looks at whether there are any educational advantages to attending private schools in the upper secondary years (Grades 11 and 12).

Published in the Oxford Review of Education, the study used data from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies’ Next Steps cohort study and linked this to national student achievement information between 2005 and 2009. The researchers followed a sample of 5,852 students who attended a private or state school while doing their A levels (high-stakes exams taken at the end of Grade 12, and important for university admission). The findings were:

• The profiles of the two groups of students were very different – students arrived in private school sixth forms with significantly higher prior attainment in GCSEs (exams taken at the end of 10^thgrade), and from households that had twice the income of families whose children attended state school sixth form.
• However, the researchers used the data available from Next Steps to allow for socio-demographic characteristics and prior achievement. Allowing for these characteristics, students at private schools outperformed those at state schools in their total A level score by eight percentile points.
• Private school students also performed better on those subjects deemed to be more important to elite universities.

The researchers suggest that the reason for the difference may lie in the vastly superior resources per pupil in private schools (three times the state school average), including smaller pupil-teacher ratios (roughly half the state school average). However, they caution that their results are not truly causal.

Source (Open Access): Henderson, M., Anders, J., Green, F., & Henseke, G. (2019). Private schooling, subject choice, upper secondary attainment and progression to university. Oxford Review of Education, Advance online publication. Doi: 10.1080/03054985.2019.1669551… Read the rest

Findings from a randomized controlled trial of Tools of the Mind (Tools) suggest that the program improves kindergarten students’ academic outcomes in reading and writing, enhances children’s joy in learning and teachers’ enjoyment of teaching, and reduces teacher burnout.

The Tools program is a play-based preschool and kindergarten curriculum that emphasizes self-control, language, and literacy skills. The study, published in the journal PLoS One, analyzed the effectiveness of Tools on kindergarten teachers and 351 children (mean age 5.2 years at entry) with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in 18 public schools in Canada. Schools were paired with closely matched schools and then randomized to either the intervention group or control group. Teachers in the intervention group received a three-day workshop on Tools before the school year began, along with funds for resources. Control group teachers were offered the same amount of training hours and funds for whatever training and resource materials they wanted.

The results showed that:

• Students in the Tools group made greater improvements than students in the control group on standardized tests for reading and writing. By May, three times as many children in Tools classes than in control classes were reading at grade level or better.
• Similarly, three times as many children in Tools classes than in control classes were able to write a full sentence that they composed themselves.
• Tools teachers also reported that their students could continue to work unsupervised for two and a half times longer than control teachers estimated for their students, and that 100% could get back to work right away after breaks, compared to 50% of control children.

The Tools program also had a positive impact on how teachers felt about teaching. More than three-quarters of Tools teachers, but none of the control teachers, reported in May that they were still enthusiastic about teaching.

Source (Open Access): Diamond, A., Lee, C., Senften, P., Lam, A., & Abbott, D. (2019). Randomized control trial of Tools of the Mind: Marked benefits to kindergarten children and their teachers. PLOS ONE, 14(9), e0222447. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222447… Read the rest

A study published in Educational Psychology examines how different approaches to rewarding students affected their spelling scores and prosocial behavior for different ability levels.

A total of 1,005 students, aged 9 and 10, in 28 classes were recruited from three primary schools in Singapore. Classes were randomly assigned to one of five reward conditions: competitive, cooperative, individualistic, cooperative-competitive, and cooperative-individualistic. An ABABA (A= implementation, B = withdrawal) design was used for each condition, and students’ spelling scores were tracked over a period of 10 weeks. Teachers were asked to rate students’ prosocial behavior before and after the study. The results showed that

• The different conditions did affect students’ spelling scores and prosocial behavior, but that these effects depended on ability level, such that different conditions were more effective for different ability levels. 
• Across all five conditions, only the cooperative-competitive condition resulted in increased spelling scores and prosocial behavior across all three ability groups, with these improvements maintained when the intervention was withdrawn.
• In the cooperative-competitive condition, students cooperated as a group and the group with the highest average spelling score (compared to other groups) was rewarded.

Source: Wah, F., & Sim, T. N. (2019). Effects of reward pedagogy on spelling scores and prosocial behaviors in primary school students in Singapore. Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. Doi:10.1080/01443410.2019.1662888.… Read the rest

An article published in the Early Childhood Education Journal shows that maternal reading level predicts both a child’s receptive vocabulary and reading proficiency prior to schooling, after maternal education is taken into account. The findings also controlled for ethnicity, number of children in the family, and marital and employment status.

The authors used a sample of 155 children (aged 3-5 years) and their mothers (aged 20-44 years) of low-income and low-educational backgrounds from Western Canada. Children and mothers were tested individually for their reading proficiency using standardized tests, and children’s receptive vocabulary proficiency was also tested. The mothers were also interviewed one-to-one for demographic information. All the families spoke English first and foremost, although some were bilingual. The findings were:

• Both mothers’ measured reading levels and their reported educational levels were significant predictors of children’s reading proficiency, each over and above the other.
• However, in the case of children’s receptive vocabulary proficiency, they found that mothers’ reading levels were a significant predictor, but that mothers’ educational level was not.

In light of this, the authors recommend that early childhood educators may consider implementing programs to support mothers in improving their reading, in order to raise their children’s language and literacy levels.   

Source : Phillips, L. M., Norris, S. P., Hayward, D. V., & Lovell, M. A. (2017). Unique Contributions of Maternal Reading Proficiency to Predicting Children’s Preschool Receptive Vocabulary and Reading Proficiency. Early Childhood Education Journal, 45(1), 111–119. … Read the rest

A study of a program that sent literacy-related advice via text messages to parents of preschool children showed that it improved both the parents’ literacy behavior and the children’s early literacy.

READY4K! is an eight-month-long text messaging program for parents of preschool children. Parents receive texts that cover literacy skills, encourage them to participate, and provide follow-up tips. In the study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 519 parents in California were randomly assigned to receive the program or a series of “placebo” texts (e.g., about school enrollment) during the 2013-14 school year. The results indicated:

• The texts increased the frequency with which parents read books to children and other literacy activities (effects up to 0.35 standard deviations higher).
• According to teachers, texted parents asked more questions about their child’s learning (up to 0.19 standard deviations higher) than placebo parents, and their children performed better on early measures of literacy – lower-case alphabet knowledge and letter sounds (up to 0.34 standard deviations higher).

The authors say that the widespread use, low cost, and ease of scalability of text messaging make it an attractive approach for supporting parenting practices.

Source (Open Access): York, B.N. & Loeb, S. (2014). One step at a time: The effects of an early literacy text messaging program for parents of preschoolers (NBER Working Paper 20659). Cambridge, UK: National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from: https://www.nber.org/papers/w20659.pdf… Read the rest