Educational research fads – Beware fleeting trends
Educational fads can do more harm than good, so make sure you understand the subject before blind implementation…
- by Adam Boxer
Way back in the pre-Covid past, I attended a big, glitzy conference in London. One of the presenters put a list of 10 different study strategies up on the big screen – highlighting, mnemonics, retrieval practice, etc – and said that he had tried each one with his Year 12 class in order to develop their metacognition.
Queue many oohs, many ahhs, and the scribbling of a thousand pens as senior and middle leaders planned how they could use this to teach metacognition and achieve the EEF’s promised ‘seven months’ additional progress’.
Approaches to education and teacher training
As I saw it, there were only two snags in this otherwise faultless ‘research-to-classroom’ conveyor belt. First, the source of the presenter’s list of 10 study strategies.
The list had been pulled from Dunlosky’s Strengthening the Student Toolbox, an article exploring popular study habits, which notably doesn’t present the strategies as ‘interesting things to try out’, but as a clear hierarchy from ‘effective at improving retention’ to ‘ineffective at improving retention’.
So whilst ‘practice testing’ is effective at improving retention and should be implemented by teachers, ‘highlighting’ or ‘keyword mnemonics’ are not effective, and should not be implemented.
In the name of metacognition, our presenter had literally wasted his students’ time with strategies that would not be effective. He might as well have said “let’s try and learn it through the medium of dance to boost our metacognition.”
Educational researchers and education in schools
Secondly, very little information was given about the subject he was teaching or the actual content that the students were trying out.
As the EEF’s clear warning lays out, thinking of metacognition as a ‘general skill that can be separated from subject knowledge’ is ‘perhaps the most common misconception’.
Metacognition isn’t something you can just impose on your school or department; it needs to be carefully thought through in terms of how it relates to what students are learning on a particular day or in a particular lesson.
Sadly, our profession has a long history of taking ideas, running with them, and allowing them to pervade our school system. Often, this is despite a non-existent evidence base (see brain gym or learning styles), but sometimes there is an evidence base, we just implement it in a way that is not true to that base.
Metacognition is a good example of this, where the research exists, but the implementation is often at odds with it.
Such cases are often called ‘lethal mutations’ – where a good idea becomes mutated into something that might not literally be lethal, but is at the very least a waste of your and your students’ time.
Despite the profession’s recent – broadly positive and constructive – moves to evidence-based practice, there are a couple of areas where the risk of lethal mutation looms large.
One example is the now ubiquitous Dual Coding Theory, which normally involves colourful posters or documents festooned with icons from the Noun Project.
This isn’t my understanding of Dual Coding Theory, and risks not just wasting teachers’ time, but convincing us that explaining complex ideas is easy if we add icons, or that signalling our curriculum via a fake tube map helps students who have never stepped foot on the Underground to appreciate the links between subjects in our carefully thought-out and sequenced curriculum.
Education research and how to strategise
Which brings us to our next target: curriculum.
Ofsted’s recent focus on the substance of education is – to my mind – to be welcomed, but there are already some mutated implementations floating around online.
For example, while one of the architects of the new education inspection framework has statedthat there is no need for a new curriculum intent statement, I have seen dozens of examples of middle leaders being asked to produce such a statement.
I have seen teachers asked to prepare scheme-of-work planning documents which mash together intent statements, mastery criteria, success criteria, differentiation over time, literacy across the curriculum, numeracy across the curriculum, transferable skills across the school… all in an attempt to satisfy an inspection framework that asks for none of the above.
Even within Dunlosky’s article above, practice testing – or retrieval practice – is in the lethal mutation danger zone.
Whilst a five-minute mini-quiz at the beginning of a lesson might technically count as retrieval practice, if it isn’t a sustained strategy that cuts across all aspects of your teaching and homework, all you serve to do by asking your students questions on content from six months ago is to frustrate them when they inevitably can’t remember it.
Sadly, I come with many problems but no solutions. It isn’t feasible for every teacher in the land to become an expert in all the research underpinning certain ideas, and when presenters at conferences are getting it so badly wrong, is it any wonder that everybody else does too?
Find Adam at achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @adamboxer1.
