Trialled and Tested

In this latest episode, ‘is teaching becoming more evidence-informed?’, Sir Kevan Collins, the departing chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is interviewed by Evidence Based Education’s Jamie Scott about his eight years in the role – taking the EEF from a small start-up with three employees (“and a decent bank balance”) to becoming a global leader in generating and using evidence to improve educational outcomes for children and young people.

Sir Kevan Collins discusses the appetite for such research among teachers and policy makers, the EEF’s successes and challenges, and identifies the top five changes he’d make as education secretary.

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New Trialled and Tested podcast looks at improving Social and Emotional Learning.

Effective social and emotional learning (SEL) can increase positive pupil behaviour, mental health and well-being, and academic performance.

Indeed, evidence from the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective SEL can lead to learning gains of +4 months over the course of a year. However, despite being seen as one of their top priorities by almost all primary schools, only just over one-third say that dedicated planning for SEL is central to their practice.

The recent EEF guidance report, Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary Schools, reviewed the best available research and offered school leaders six practical recommendations to support good SEL for all children.

In this episode of our podcast series, Trialled and Tested, EBE’s Jamie Scott speaks to Jean Gross CBE, one of the authors of the guidance report, Liz Robinson, who sat on the advisory panel, and headteacher Mari Palmer for her views on implementing SEL strategies.

Although the guidance is aimed at Primary Schools, both the guidance and the podcast is just as relevant to parents of young children.

‘Trialled and Tested’ is produced in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation.

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In this episode of the Trialled and Tested podcast we explore working memory and its importance to teaching and learning; what it is, why it’s important for teachers to know about it and how an understanding of working memory can inform the way teachers teach.

Working memory is the ability to hold and manipulate information in your mind while you use it to finish a task. For example, this could be how many numbers you can keep in your mind at the same time to complete a mental arithmetic task. Research has suggested that working memory is a reliable predictor of numeracy outcomes. But why is it important to learning? What do teachers need to know about it and how can they attend to it in their daily working practices?

In this podcast, we hear from a psychologist and leading expert, Dr Tracy Alloway, as well as conversation with Alex Quigley from the EEF and Julie Watson from Huntington Research School.

You can read about the Education Endowment Trust’s project focused on improving working memory for pupils age seven and eight here.

For more podcasts, be sure to check out our podcast archive. We also have a collection of eBooks, videos and webinars in our Resource Library, which is free to join!

“Teaching should start from where the student is, not from where we would like them to be.” says education professor Dylan Wiliam. In this episode of Trialled and Tested: Embedding Formative Assessment, we introduce how formative assessment strategies can be used in the classroom.

Dylan is the co-developer of a professional development programme, Embedding Formative Assessment, which supports teachers to use real-time knowledge of their pupils’ strengths and weaknesses to adapt their practice. The programme builds on existing evidence that formative assessment can improve students’ learning. Many schools already prioritise formative assessment, but it can be challenging to implement. An independent evaluation funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) recently found that pupils in schools following the Embedding Formative Assessment programme made the equivalent of +2 months’ additional progress in their Attainment 8 GCSE score.

Find out more, as Evidence Based Education’s Jamie Scott spoke to some of the people behind the programme – Dylan Wiliam, Emily Yeomans, Corinne Settle and Claire Taylor – and its evaluation to find out what it is all about. Tune in to hear from:

Full length: 38m

You can read about the Education Endowment Trust’s Embedding Formative Assessment project in full here.

For more podcasts, be sure to check out our podcast archive and subscribe! We also have a collection of eBooks, videos and webinars in our Resource Library, which is free to join!

In this episode of Trialled and Tested: Improving secondary science, Jamie Scott from Evidence Based Education speaks to Emily Yeomans (EEF Head of Programme Strategy), Sir John Holman (Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of York) and Dr Niki Kaiser (Chemistry Teacher and Research Lead at Norwich Research School) to explore some of the evidence-informed strategies teachers can adopt or focus on to enhance the teaching and learning of science at Key Stages 3 and 4.

Emily Yeomans and Sir John Holman: Start to 31:35

Dr Niki Kaiser: 31:35 to end

The recommendations discussed in the podcast, as well as many others, feature in the EEF Improving Secondary Science guidance report which you can download here: Improving secondary science guidance report and Summary of recommendations.

All of our podcasts, including the Trialled and Tested podcast series, can be found in our podcast archive.

In this episode of the Trialled and Tested podcast, ‘Efficacy, evidence and evaluation’, Jamie Scott from Evidence Based Education speaks to Eleanor Stringer and Matthew van Poortvliet from the Education Endowment Foundation to find out more about their approach to identifying projects to fund, scaling-up promising projects and running evaluations.

Here’s a full account of the questions put to Eleanor and Matthew:

2:02 – What does the EEF look for when considering which projects to fund?

3:15 – How much initial evidence do you need to get EEF funding for a project?

3:58 – What are the different stages of the EEF evaluation pipeline? And why and how might you scale-up a project from efficacy to effectiveness?

6:45 – Examples of scale-up projects

9:20 – Are EEF evaluation projects typically coming out of academic institutions or schools?

11:19 – Why have some trials been re-trialled?

14:08 – How does the evidence behind the ‘Embedding Formative Assessment’ project differ from other professional development programmes that might not have been trialled?

16:41 – How does the EEF respond to criticism of the approach to project evaluation, especially a perceived preference for randomised controlled trial designs?

21:55 – Some EEF trials have found results that conflict with previously-published findings – does this point to a replication problem in education research?

24:43 – How has the work the EEF has done since its inception improved the scientific endeavour of evaluation?

26:33 – What do you hope is the lasting impact of EEF project evaluations?

28:09 – Why are certain approaches or strategies not included in the EEF toolkit, despite there being strong evidence behind them?

Remember to subscribe to the Trialled and Tested podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts, as this is the last episode that we’ll also share through our EBE feed… Don’t miss out!

We’ve teamed up with the Education Endowment Foundation to bring you a new podcast – Trialled and Tested! This first episode is on metacognition and self-regulated learning.

We’ll post this inaugural episode on the EBE podcast too, but to make sure you have access to future episodes, do search for Trialled and Tested in iTunes, Spotify or Google Store and make sure you subscribe there.

In this first episode, and in future episodes, we’re going to explore a specific piece of information or guidance within the EEF suite of resources and try to bring that to life through discussion with others. In addition, we’ll be providing brief updates from the network of Research Schools around England, to find out what they’re doing to support the use of evidence to improve teaching practice.

In this first episode, EBE’s own Jamie Scott talks to Alex Quigley and Megan Dixon to ask what is metacognition and self-regulation and how can approaches be implemented in the classroom? In addition we hear from Caroline Creaby and Roger Higgins from Sandringham and Norwich Research Schools.

Alex Quigley: Start to 26:55

Megan Dixon: 26:55 to 37:52

Caroline Creaby and Roger Higgins: 37:52 to end

If you enjoy this podcast you might also like this podcast where EBE Director of Education Stuart Kime talks to Robert and Elizabeth Bjork about their work on desirable difficulties