Collins – teaching and learning toolkit

One of the most difficult things in education is to try and bring together everything that we already know, or we think we know. And so we’ve been developing an instrument called the teaching and learning toolkit. Now the toolkit is essentially a synthesis of meta-studies and as we know meta-studies are themselves collections of studies. So we developed a toolkit with the University of Durham which has about 15,000 studies and from that we filtered out a couple thousand studies around early education. And then what we did with the studies we grouped them under themes, concepts of literacy and communication, self-regulation, executive functioning, play, technology, a whole set of things.  

And then what we do is we go into the studies and we begin to filter out if you like, or gather bits of information. And the three big bits of information we ask ourselves are when you make this change and bring more of that to a child’s life, it’s what the studies kind of evaluate, the impact of adding more and controlling for some children receiving and some not receiving more of a particular kind of intervention or activity. We ask ourselves three questions.  What does it cost to do that thing? We try and represent that with a metrics where more pound signs are colored in although actually if you go under that it tells you how much per child, how much per class.  

We ask ourselves the really important question of how much evidence is there, how strong is the evidence? Because always in research you have to ask yourself how good is the evidence? Not just whether, it’s, you know, whether it tells you if it’s positive or negative, how strong is the evidence. And we do that by filling in padlocks. That’s the weight of the evidence if you like, and the quality. And the third thing we ask is on average when people make that change and when they control for that in the study, what kind of difference did it make? Did children learn more when you made that change or not? And we represent that by converting effect size into how many more months of progress on average do children make in a school year when you made that change?  

So we bring all the studies together under that kind of matrix – under those matrix and we say here’s what we think we know happened, not what will happen but what happened in those studies done by colleagues in many countries since 1980 is our kind of cut-off point.