Research abstracts for Learning and Teaching
Contents
- How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School
- Progression and Continuity in early Childhood Education: Tensions and Contradictions
- School Effectiveness and Teacher Effectiveness: Some preliminary Findings from the Evaluation of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme
- Developing the capacity to collaborate
- Promoting Thinking for Learning through Collaborative Enquiry: An Evaluation of ‘Thinking through Philosophy’
- An Exploration of Long-term Far-transfer Effects Following an Extended Intervention Programme in High School Science Curriculum
- A Curriculum for Excellence:Overview of Recent Research-Based Literature for the Curriculum Review
- Formative assessment and the design of instructional system
- Classrooms: goals, structures and student motivation
- Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment
- Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task-involving and Ego-involving Evaluation on interest and performance
- Getting it right - distance marking as accessible and effective feedback in the primary classroom
- Eighth Grade Mathematics and Science Benchmarking Report: Executive Summary
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School
National Research Council (2000), Washington DC: National Academy Press
The evidence from research is that when the following principles are incorporated into teaching pupil achievement improves.
Teachers need to draw out and work with the existing knowledge and understandings that pupils bring with them into the classroom. They need to involve learners actively in the learning process through questioning and discussion, and by creating appropriate tasks and activities. The use of formative assessment to provide frequent feedback is also important if learning with understanding is to be achieved rather than merely the ability to repeat facts or perform isolated skills.
The teaching of metacognitive skills should be integrated into the curriculum in a variety of subjects and curricular areas. It is by talking about their thinking that pupils’ understanding can be reinforced and developed. Research has demonstrated that children can be taught a range of strategies including the ability to predict outcomes, explain to oneself in order to improve understanding, note failures to understand, activate background knowledge, plan ahead and apportion time.
Teachers should provide a firm foundation in terms of subject matter. The ability to plan a task, recognise patterns and connections, put forward arguments and explanations and draw analogies are all more closely intertwined with factual knowledge than was once believed. Factual knowledge also needs to be taught in an organised way so that the key concepts within a discipline can be understood.
Progression and Continuity in early Childhood Education: Tensions and Contradictions
E Wood and N Bennett (1999), International Journal of Early Years Education 7 (1) 5-16
Research has shown that young children learn best when they are actively interacting with others and their environment rather than being passive recipients of information. Early years teaching should be highly interactive and pupils should be encouraged to explore their environment. Children should have opportunities to record their learning in a variety of ways - verbally, written, through painting, drawing and building things.
School Effectiveness and Teacher Effectiveness: Some preliminary Findings from the Evaluation of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme
R D Muijs and D Reynolds (2000), School Effectiveness and School Improvement 11 (2)
The pupils who showed the strongest gains in mathematics achievement were those whose teachers spent more time teaching the whole class as opposed to teaching individuals. More whole-class teaching allows teachers to be effective, in a way that individualised approaches do not. While spending a large proportion of the lesson teaching the whole class is beneficial, individual or group practice is also necessary to enhance pupil learning.
The centrality of the teacher in pupils’ learning processes is clear. Any approach designed to let pupils learn on their own, with the teacher acting merely as a 'facilitator' is likely to fall short of the cognitive demands of primary age children.
Developing the capacity to collaborate
L Dawes & C Sams (2004). K Littleton, D Miell and D Faulkner (eds), Learning to Collaborate: Collaborating to Learn, Nova Science Inc.
The direct teaching of speaking and listening skills can help children to understand the purposes of group work and provide them with the means to collaborate with one another.
A number of strategies have been shown to help children as they develop effective discussion skills and begin to apply them, for example modelling the kinds of conversations that children are being asked to engage in and encouraging children to reflect on and evaluate the quality of their discussion.
Promoting Thinking for Learning through Collaborative Enquiry: An Evaluation of ‘Thinking through Philosophy’
S Trickey (2006), Doctoral Thesis, Dundee University
Experimental pupils in the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) study gained an average of six standardised points on the Cognitive Abilities Test suggesting that the Philosophy for Children process had a positive impact on the pupils’ reasoning abilities. Gains were also found in the experimental group in the Myself-As-a-Learner-Scale (MALS) study suggesting that the process of enquiry can lead to improvements in self-perceptions of academic self-esteem.
The study of the impact of ‘communities of enquiry’ on dialogue and critical thinking through video analysis of classroom discussion found evidence of gains in critical thinking, increased participation of pupils, more elaborated pupil responses and increased use of open-ended questioning by teachers.
The study of pupil perceptions of social/emotional outcomes arising from their participation in ‘communities of enquiry’ suggested that collaborative enquiry increased pupil perceptions of participation, communication skills, confidence and concentration.
An Exploration of Long-term Far-transfer Effects Following an Extended Intervention Programme in High School Science Curriculum
M Shayer and P Adey (2002), in C Deforges and R Fox (eds) Teaching and Learning: The Essential Readings, Blackwell Publishing
Pupils involved in the CASE (Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education) project performed significantly better in the English GCSE science examination than a matched control group, not just in science but in other subjects as well. The gains in English and maths as well as the expected gains in Science appeared several years after the initial intervention.
The learning activities involved cognitive conflict - pupils are led to make observations that do not fit with their expectations; dialogue with the whole class and with individuals and small groups; metacognition - pupils are helped to become aware of and articulate the sort of thinking they are using to solve different problems; bridging - linking what has been developed to the broader science curriculum and pupils' own experiences.
A Curriculum for Excellence: Overview of Recent Research-Based Literature for the Curriculum Review
Donald Christie and Brian Boyd, University of Strathclyde
A Curriculum for Excellence identifies three factors upon which the opportunity for children to develop the four capacities will depend - the environment for learning, the choice of teaching and learning approaches and the ways in which learning is organised. In their review of the research-based literature the authors identified a number of common themes across the different ‘areas’ of the curriculum and grouped them under the three factors. The themes are listed below together with some key questions.
The environment for learning
Respect - to what extent is the integrity of individuals and groups safeguarded and enhanced by the learning experiences provided?
Pupil voice - to what extent are pupils consulted and encouraged to express their views about, and hence shape, their own learning experiences through constructive dialogue?
Experiential learning - how can we create an environment in which students are allowed to interact in real life contexts, to construct individual meaning and to engage in complex actions that reflect life outside school?
Relevance - can learners relate the purposes of the learning to their own needs and interests arising out of their individual experiences of life – in school, in their families and in their communities?
Clear goals and feedback - to what extent can pupils share in setting targets for their own learning and how is attainment and progress tracked and effectively communicated to learners in ways that can enhance their learning processes?
The choice of teaching and learning approaches
Active engagement - how can learning activities be designed in order to provide a stimulating context for the active engagement of individual learners?
Meaningfulness - how can we ensure that the learner can make the necessary connections with new information, and make sense of the learning experiences provided?
Motivation - is there a willingness on the part of pupils to engage with the process of learning? How can we make the learning challenging, enjoyable and/or seen as worthy of effort?
Metacognition - how can pupils be encouraged to be reflective – to ‘learn how to learn’?
ICT and learning - how can we use ICT tools to enhance and transform pupils’ learning?
The ways in which learning is organised
Cooperative and collaborative learning - what opportunities are provided for peer mediated learning? How can a collaborative learning community be constructed in order to reap the advantages of a classroom culture within which teachers and students support one another in pursuit of clearly articulated goals?
Problem-based learning - how can we provide pupils with the challenge of real problems to solve as individuals or in collaborative groups, thus fostering the motivation which comes from a genuine ‘need to know’ the answer?
Grouping - how can the needs of individual pupils best be met by differentiation and organisational strategies that do not themselves create negative consequences?
Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems
R Sadler (1989), Instructional Science, 18, 119-44
The core of formative assessment lies in the sequence of two actions. The first is the perception by the learner of a gap between the desired goal and his or her present state of knowledge/understanding/skill. The second is the action taken by the learner to close the gap in order to attain the desired goal. The learner first has to understand the evidence about this gap and then take action on the basis of that evidence. Although the teacher can stimulate and guide this process, the learning has to be done by the learner. This suggests that the development of self-assessment by the learner is an important feature of any programme of formative assessment.
Classrooms: goals, structures and student motivation
C Ames (1992), Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 261-71
This study describes the importance of learning intentions or goals for learning. Ames calls these 'mastery goals' because they are based on the belief that effort will lead to success or a sense of mastery. With a mastery goal, individuals are focused on developing their skills, trying to understand their work or improving their level of competence. Students’ beliefs that they can accomplish a task with reasonable effort, and their willingness to apply the effort, can be enhanced when tasks are defined in terms of specific and short-term goals.
Mastery goals increase the amount of time children spend on learning tasks. They also strengthen their persistence in the face of difficulty and improve the quality of their engagement in learning. Active engagement is characterised by the application of effective learning and problem-solving strategies, and students’ use of these strategies is dependent on a belief that effort leads to success and that failure can be remedied by a change in strategy.
Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment
P Black and D Wiliam (1998), London: School of Education, King’s College
Formative assessment can have a strong positive impact on pupil performance, especially if particular feedback strategies are used. For example, rather than just giving marks teachers should provide written comments on pupil work, in particular comments that focus on precise ways pupils can improve their work. This has been found to lead to significant improvements in learning.
Developing pupils’ self-assessment skills can also help them to become more self-regulated and effective learners. For pupils to be able to do that three elements need to be in place: clear goals or targets for pupils, clear information on where they stand in relations to those targets, and some understanding of how they can close the gap between where they are now and their targets.
Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task-involving and Ego-involving Evaluation on interest and performance
R Butler (1988), British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58, 1-14
The study set up three different ways of providing feedback to learners: marks, comments and a combination of marks and comments. Learning gains were greatest for the group given only comments, with the other two methods showing no gains.
Marks and marks plus comments had similar and generally undermining effects on pupils learning. Among the possible explanations for this are: pupils ignore comments when marks are also given, preferring to compare marks with their peers as their first reaction to getting work back; teachers rarely give pupils time to in class to read comments and few, if any, pupils return to consider these at home. When comments alone are given pupils are motivated to engage more productively in improving their work.
Getting it right - distance marking as accessible and effective feedback in the primary classroom
S Clarke (2001), in S Askew (ed) Feedback for Learning, RoutledgeFalmer
Distance marking is where the main form of individual feedback a pupils receives is via the words and marks made on their work by the teacher. Clarke describes formative assessment and explores the research that establishes the conditions necessary for successful feedback and marking. She also describes some practical strategies, based on her own research, for making distance marking a more accessible and effective form of feedback.
Eighth Grade Mathematics and Science Benchmarking Report: Executive Summary
TIMSS 1999
TIMSS 1999 a successor to the acclaimed 1999 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), focused on the mathematics and science achievement of eighth-grade students. Thirty-eight countries including the United States participated in TIMSS 1999.
The choices teachers make determine, to a large extent, what students learn. In effective teaching, worthwhile mathematical and science problems are used to introduce important ideas and engage students’ thinking. The results showed that higher achievement is related to the emphasis that teachers place on reasoning and problem-solving activities. This finding is consistent with the video study component of TIMSS conducted in 1995. Analyses of videotapes of mathematics classes revealed that in the typical mathematics lesson in Japan students worked on developing solutions to report to the class that were often expected to be original constructions. In contrast, in the typical U.S. lesson students essentially practiced procedures that had been demonstrated by the teacher.