5 Lessons Education Research Taught Us In 2014
Studies, research papers, doctoral dissertations, conference presentations — each year academia churns out thousands of pieces of research on education. And for many of them, that's the end of it — they gather dust in the university library or languish in some forgotten corner of the Internet.
A few, though, find their way into the hands of teachers, principals and policymakers. Each year the American Educational Research Association — a 99-year-old national research society — puts out a list of its 10 most-read articles.
We've looked over that list and compiled a summary of some of what we learned from the ivory tower in 2014.
1) What's The Best Way To Teach Math To Struggling First Graders? The Old-Fashioned Way.
Math teachers will often try to get creative with their lesson plans if their students are struggling to grasp concepts. But in "Which Instructional Practices Most Help First-Grade Students With and Without Mathematics Difficulties?," the researchers found that plain, old-fashioned practice and drills — directed by the teacher — were far more effective than "creative" methods such as music, math toys and student-directed learning.
The researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and Penn State examined more than 13,000 first-grade math students in 1,300 different schools nationally.
They found that first graders who scored in the bottom 15 percent on math tests were more often subject to activities that have no evidence of fostering retention or improving performance. For example, teachers with lots of struggling students often sought to liven up their lessons by adding movement or music. But the researchers found little evidence that those methods worked.
Instead, they found that that the only activity associated with gains in performance on an adaptive, un-timed, one-one-one administered test is what we think of as traditional instruction. Namely, a teacher demonstrating how to solve a problem, followed by repeated opportunities for students to work by themselves, replicating the procedure with worksheets and drills.
These results run contrary to some interpretations of the Common Core, where students collaborate, talk through a problem, and dissect the different ways to reach a solution. The researchers found that while this kind of learning can work for some students, those already struggling in math failed to grasp concepts as easily as they did under more traditional lessons.
2) The Effectiveness Of Alignment
When a teacher's curriculum is perfectly aligned with a set of standards, meaning they're teaching exactly what they're told to, will students' test scores rise? That's the question a group of researchers set out to answer in "Instructional Alignment as a Measure of Teaching Quality."
Finding an answer to this is critical since better instructional alignment is a driving component of the Common Core.
Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania looked at 324 teachers in six large school districts (New York City; Dallas; Denver; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.; Memphis; and Hillsborough County, Fla.) in 2010.
Once the researchers created a measure for how closely aligned a teacher's curriculum was with standards, they examined the correlation of that alignment with teachers' ability to raise test scores (as measured by value-added models, which granted, have their own complications).
The results did not show a meaningful relationship between the two. Meaning, perfectly aligned curriculum is no more likely to be associated with gains in tests scores as is perfectly unaligned curriculum.
3 and 4) On The Higher-Ed Front
The big story in higher education in 2015 so far has been President Obama's proposal for two free years of community college. Two of the most-read education research articles of 2014 were focused on different aspects of community college.
In "Labor Market Returns to Sub-Baccalaureate Credentials", researchers from the Career Ladders Project and Columbia University spent seven years tracking more than 5 Lessons Education Research Taught Us In 2014 : NPR Ed : NPR:
