Professional Development
How to be a better consumer of education research
In the UK, evidence regarding the impact of educational interventions is often communicated in terms of additional months of progress. However, other metrics could be used. For example, the impact could be expressed as the number of additional students passing an important test (for example, the Key Stage 2 assessment), the number of additional points obtained on a test, or by using a 0 to 100 improvement index, a way of communicating an intervention’s impact used by the US-based Institute of Education Sciences.
In this presentation, I describe a recent study that Matthew Inglis (Loughborough University), Ut Na Sio (University of Sheffield) and I conducted, in which we showed that different metrics have different influences on teachers’ perceptions of an intervention’s effectiveness. Our findings also revealed what metrics teachers considered most informative, understandable, and helpful, and suggests ways to help teachers develop accurate expectations of the impact of educational interventions.
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About Dr Hugo Lortie-Forgues
Dr Hugo Lortie-Forgues is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics Education Centre.
His research focuses on mathematics education, in particular how children and adults learn arithmetic involving fractions and decimals. Another major goal of his research is to improve how educational interventions are evaluated and how their impact is communicated to non-specialists.
Ages: Primary, Secondary