Studies seek to build the evidence needed for best education practice

New studies are under way to determine what approaches work best in our classrooms to lift education standards.

Evidence for Learning chief executive Matthew Deeble. Picture: James Croucher

Every day, in schools across the country, innovative teachers are adopting practices and employing techniques that are having an ­effect on their students’ learning.

Perhaps it’s an intervention to assist reluctant readers, an enjoyable activity designed to energise students when an afternoon slump sets in or a way of managing a disruptive child. Sometimes these interventions work and sometimes not. Regardless, Evidence for Learning chief executive Matthew Deeble believes all educators, and those being educated, should know about it.

The organisation, which is backed by Social Ventures Australia and the Commonwealth Bank, is involved in two large-scale education studies — both randomised, controlled trials typical of those run in science and medicine — in a bid to find out what really works in a classroom.

“What we have now is a situation where teachers, schools are making 100 decisions a day about what to do for a kid’s learning,” Deeble says. “But what is the basis for that decision-making? Is it the teacher’s own experience in what has worked and what hasn’t? Is it dictated by the attitudes of the school’s leader? Or is it based on hard evidence? Part of the growing professionalism of ­teaching is making sure that these decisions are ­informed by good-quality evidence.”

Deeble is not alone. In a bid to boost Australia’s lagging education standards, the federal government is also pushing to link the promise of extra billions in funding to the most effective teaching and learning strategies and initiatives. A review, conducted by ­businessman David Gonski, ident­ified a lack of research-based evidence on what works best in education to be a significant constraint and recommended the ­establishment of a national evidence institute to share best-practice and evidence-based inno­vations faster and more widely.

The recommendation has been welcomed by Evidence for Learning, which says an evidence broker is the missing piece of the puzzle in the national education landscape.

With negotiations under way between the federal and state and territory governments, Deeble is keen to see the proposed ­institute established as an independent entity, with a broad skills-based board to ensure it remains free from political interference and agendas.

One of the areas in education that has been an ideological battleground is the teaching of reading, evidenced by the battle between phonics proponents and those who favour a whole language approach.

Interestingly, the NSW government ­recently axed funding for the controversial Reading Recovery program after it was found to be ineffective with most students. It had been running for 30 years at a cost of $50 million a year to taxpayers.

Evidence for Learning is involved in a trial to test a small-group reading intervention that is being carried out at nine schools and involving 237 students.

The program, called MiniLit, targets the bottom 25 per cent of readers in Year 1 and consists of 80 one-hour lessons, typically delivered across 20 weeks, to groups of four students. The lessons — delivered by trained teachers or trained para­professionals under teacher supervision — focus on five keys to reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, ­vocabulary and comprehension.

The primary goal of the trial will be to determine whether the students who participate in the MiniLit intervention have better reading outcomes 12 months after randomisation compared with those who have regular classroom teaching. Analysis of the trial is due to end by the end of the year and the results will be published regardless of the outcome.

Another one of Evidence for Learning’s programs is the development of a “teacher toolkit” based on a similar concept out of Britain that summar­ises the global evidence on 34 approaches to lift learning outcomes in schools.

The effectiveness of each ­approach, or intervention, is measured in the months of impact in student learning that can be achieved compared with expected average student progress across a year. More months of impact mean a more effective intervention. For example, teacher feedback, phonics and early years intervention have been shown to advance learning between four and eight months. In contrast, a school’s physical environment — such as new buildings or a particular type of architecture — and school uniform have little impact on student performance.

Repeating a struggling student or streaming — where students of similarly achieving levels are grouped ­together for lessons on a regular basis — has been shown to impede learning progression.

Deeble wants to see the toolkit expand. He highlights the recent focus on so-called 21st-century skills such as critical and creative thinking that were a substantial focus of the Gonski report. Teachers now are urged to develop ways to explicitly teach these skills and measure students’ progress, which has attracted criticism from some educators who do not believe that such skills are generic or able to be taught, let alone measured.

Deeble agrees there’s work to be done.

“We know a lot about teaching and measuring literacy and numeracy, obviously, but don’t know much about how we go about measuring these 21st-century skills,” he says. “The critics are quite right in saying until we can show a teacher how to teach it and measure it, it’s difficult to ask schools to be teaching it.”

Deeble says policymakers should pay attention to the innovation that is already occurring in schools. He knows of one secondary school that has ditched the traditional timetable of 50-minute classes and replaced it with three extended lessons that run from morning to recess, recess to lunchtime and then for the rest of the school day.

“We want to facilitate a way for this sort of work to be trialled and examined, to ascertain whether they might also be effective on a larger scale,” Deeble says.

“Our ­research shows that there’s a strong desire from ­teachers to be able to access a better evidence base to inform their practice. The problem now is that a lot of evidence is informed by academic research … which often doesn’t tell teachers how they can use it in a classroom.”