Tom Sherrington

Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access.

There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, I am pulling them together into one place for easy access.   I’ll keep adding to it as I find things and when people make suggestions:

John Dunlosky: Strengthening the Student Toolbox

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Click to Download 

Barak Rosenshine: Principles of Instruction

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Click to Download 

See also: Rosenshine Re-ordered. A Poster by @olicav

Rob Coe et al:  What makes great teaching. 

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Download here.

Dylan Wiliam: 9 things every teacher should know- via tes

The article is here: https://www.tes.com/news/dylan-wiliam-nine-things-every-teacher-should-know with a nice box inset about that researchers – many of whom are featured in the other summaries represented here.

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Link to article 

James Ko et al:  Effective Teaching 

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Download here. 

John Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory, summarised by Oliver Caviglioli for How2.

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Download here.

Here’s another great paper from CESE in New South Wales on Cognitive Load Theory – with thanks to Matthew Benyohai: Summary on page 7 is very helpful.

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Download Here. 

Daniel Willingham’s Why don’t kids like school. Summary.

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Buy the book here. 

And here’s a link to Willingham’s American Educator article: 

The Learning Scientists – downloadable materials

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Full website here

Yeager, Walton and Cohen: Addressing achievement gaps with psychological interventions.

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Download here

Also, for quick reference:

EEF Toolkit:  https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/teaching-learning-toolkit

Chris Husbands and Jo Pearce: Nine claims from research

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Download here. 

American Psychology Association Top 20 Principles from Psychology

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Download full report here.

There’s a quick access summary of the 20 principles here:

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Clark, Kirschner and Sweller – A readable version of their  research into guided (and minimally guided) instruction.

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Download here. 

Education Endowment Foundation report on Metacognition: by Professor Daniel Muijs et al .

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Download Here 

Robert Slavin on Cooperative Learning – Group work – a short helpful summary via CUREE.

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Download Here.

Arthur Shimamura:   MARGE: A whole brain learning approach. 

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DOWNLOAD PDF

See also: Introducing MARGE: A superb ebook about learning by Arthur Shimamura.

Bjork:  Desirable Difficulties: 

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Download chapter here.

See also: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/desirable-difficulties which includes an excellent video presentation by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork.

The Great Teaching Toolkit

This superb review from Evidence Based Education is a definite must-read. It’s a very comprehensive guide to most of the ideas above – grouped into four categories. Download it here

This is summarised in this brilliant A4 summary:

IES Practice Guide Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning –

As recommended by Dylan Wiliam:

Download here: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/PracticeGuide/20072004.pdf

53 comments

  3. Thanks very much Tom for this amalgamation of useful research.
    I have shared via thiseducationblog.
    Gareth.

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  5. This is really useful Tom and we will retweet from EdCentral. In case of interest, we have 400+ pieces of education research signposted at https:edcentral.uk and we also curate education news daily from 250+ sources (including your blog!). We’re a not-for-profit social enterprise and access is free for teachers.

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      • A bit confused by the request. The research is *wrong* – plain and simple, so pretty much anything is better (or at least not worse).

        It is simply not true (on the basis of comparing effect sizes) that ‘feedback’ is a better bet as an educational intervention than ‘behavioural interventions’, only that a collection of experiments in feedback tend to be clearer than another collection of experiments in behavioural interventions. We should not be telling busy teachers to accept these ‘findings’ any more than we’d promote the findings of those who claim to have obtained answers from reading entrails.

        Social research is complex and the applications even more so. They can’t be reduced to decontextualised ‘tips for teachers’ without evidence that they are widespread (let alone universal) solutions and at the moment there is no such evidence even when most of the work your cites suggests they is.

        Instead, our best bets at improving education may come from encouraging teachers to read more widely that the top few lines of a league table, or ‘9 things everyone should know’. They might try digging down to original papers, looking for mechanisms which explain how an intervention may or may not work in a given context, looking for the factors which may have been present in successful interventions and which may be present in their own contexts, evaluating to quality of the work, deciding on its practical application to their situation. One might look to the approach taken by Trish Greenhalgh’s work on realist approached to evidence-based medicine as a guide to how we might look at ‘evidence’ in education.

        But the first thing we must do is stop lying to teachers that some simple and badly misunderstood statistical procedure indicates something that it simply does not.

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    • Seems to me that you’re doing a bit of sour cherry picking here. A lot of the resources Tom lists are based on general psychology and cognitive psychology, not just on educational research comparing effect sizes. It’s quite obvious that when we consider effective teaching from differing scientific perspectives and methodologies, more or less the same basic principles emerge. Note that one of the highest scoring interventions in the EEF listing (metacognition) also emerges as the defining factor from the research of Graham Nuthall; whilst as we know Nuthall worked in a very unique way. Teachers should be aware of these basic principles and adept at applying them. It’s quite clear that principles for effective teaching do not equal a recipe or a prescription. But labeling research outcomes as ‘lying to teachers’ is, how shall I put it? Lying to teachers?

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      • I love it when people talk about ‘research outcomes’ as if they must perforce be factually correct. In this case, the work of the EEF Toolkit or Hattie’s Visible Learning or anyone who uses relative effect size as a measure of the relative effectiveness of interventions has been shown to be incorrect (it is a ‘research outcome’, if you will). Yet people continue to promote what is known to be false as something true – does that not fit a reasonable person’s definition of ‘lying’.

        Of course, it is entirely possible that metacognitive training is a very powerful form of intervention (I suspect it may well be), but the argument for this on the basis of large effect size is invalid.

        There is an entertaining podcast on this topic which you might like to listen to (https://goo.gl/4yrMnF)

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  14. You might find the blog on the link below interesting Freddie. Gert Biesta has also produced some nuanced perspectives in two papers with titles “Why ‘what works’ won’t work: evidence based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research” and “Why ‘what works’ still won’t work: from evidence-based education to values-based education.

    https://theeduflaneuse.com/tag/effect-size/

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  16. This makes very interesting reading. I will be taking some of the strategies mentioned into the classroom with me next week. Thank you. Cara

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  23. […] Rather than attribute each idea, I’ll admit that the true original sources are sometimes quite difficult to pin down to specific documents as people cite other citations and so on.  I’ve only done this when it is obvious to me and I’ll happily add further links if people point me in the right direction.   However, you will find nearly all of this referenced in the documents in my collection of research papers here:  Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access. […]

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  32. […] Rather than attribute each idea, I’ll admit that the true original sources are sometimes quite difficult to pin down to specific documents as people cite other citations and so on.  I’ve only done this when it is obvious to me and I’ll happily add further links if people point me in the right direction.   However, you will find nearly all of this referenced in the documents in my collection of research papers here:  Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access. […]

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  41. Superb – thank you. I wish such a collection could be compiled exclusively for primary education. There is still far too little understanding of need for foundational skills AND advanced literacy skills. There are still c.18% of children left unfit for secondary curriculum after 7 years education. Two main reasons, possibly: ideological differences and lack of understanding that struggling beginners require masses of additional help (TAs and volunteers w. minimum briefing of main SSP progs can aid progress v.significantly).@jon_hutchinson @iQuirky_Teacher @ClareSealy

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