Reading Time: Approx 4mins
By Rob Coe
In part 1 of this series of blog posts, I set out some of the recent criticisms that have been made by researchers such as Wiliam, Simpson and Slavin about the use of effect sizes to compare the impact of different interventions and the resulting problems in combining them in meta-analysis...
Reading Time: Approx 4mins
By Rob Coe
Since I became a researcher in the late 1990s, I have been an advocate of using effect size and meta-analysis for summarising and combining results from research.
It seems hard to imagine now, but back then, both approaches were well outside the mainstream of educational research practice and were neither widely used nor understood by most education researchers, let alone policymakers or teachers...
Reading Time: Approx 4mins
By Sue Holt
The GCSE and IGCSE results have been published so no doubt there have been celebrations, commiserations and, in some cases, recriminations.
So what factors should schools consider when looking at the results?...
Reading Time: Approx 3mins
By Mark S. Steed, Director, JESS, Dubai
This week sees thousands of students receiving their GCSE results.
Now is also the time when many anxious parents hope that their children have the best possible exam results that will allow them to progress to sixth form or college, and join the path they hope will take them to university and into successful and fulfilled employment...
Reading Time: Approx 4mins
“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” - Benjamin Franklin.
With A Level and GCSE results days fast approaching attention once again turns to progress, and discussion about impact...
Reading Time: Approx 2mins
EEF findings last year suggested that teachers need “structured and intensive support” to engage with new research if outcomes are to improve, and the Carter Review of Initial Teacher Training also recommended that new teachers should be inducted in where and how to access relevant research in order to help instil an evidence-based approach to teaching...
Reading Time: Approx 3mins
By Alex Quigley
Deep vocabulary learning is irreversible, irreplaceable and essential to learning and thinking. However, as it is so integral to all of schooling and learning beyond the school gates, it proves very difficult to assess and evaluate effectively. Simply counting up words in lists will never do the job adequately...
Reading Time: Approx 4mins
By Dr Chris Jellis, Research Associate at CEM
Any good assessment is a balance between reliability and validity.
A lot has already been written about this. Dylan William discusses the complexity of the relationship between reliability and validity in Reliability, Validity and all that Jazz, where he refers to the ‘tension’ between them....
Video Duration: Approx 40mins
By Professor Rob Coe, Director, CEM
At the Festival of Education 2018, Rob Coe’s presentation followed on from his recent blog post But that is NOT AN ASSESSMENT! by discussing some of the ways schools, and teachers, can use an evidence-based approach to get better at what they do, and he looked at what’s good and what’s not good in relation to assessment...
Reading Time: Approx 4mins
By Professor Rob Coe, Director, CEM
It has become common, although I still find it surprising, to hear teachers use the word ‘data’ as if it were a bad thing.
‘Data drops’ have come to epitomise a pointless exercise in collecting meaningless numbers and feeding them into a system that can have no possible benefit for learners. People even say that Ofsted is ‘too reliant on data’, as if a judgement process could - or should – rely on anything other than data...