Education Endowment Foundation:EEF Blog:​5 summer reading suggestions from the EEF

EEF Blog:​5 summer reading suggestions from the EEF

Author
Stephen Tall
Stephen Tall
Blog •3 minutes •

The EEF has published a number of new reports and resources this past year. They may not be airport thrillers, but we hope they’ll be of interest as you re-charge your batteries ready for the new school year…

Evaluation reports

We’ve published the independent evaluations of a further 15 EEF-funded projects in the past year – all with our succinct commentaries explaining what the results mean, our interpretation, and next steps

You can read any of them here.

For those looking for a what works’ short-cut, our Promising Projects page highlights the 13 EEF-funded projects we’ve trialled which we believe have promise, and to which we have re-granted in order to test their impact at a larger scale (or which have already demonstrated positive impact in a large-scale EEF trial). Jonathan Kay’s blog explains the aims of the Promising Projects page here.

Improving Primary-Age Literacy Guidance Reports

Our Guidance Reports are designed to offer clear and actionable guidance for teachers on a range of high-priority issues. Each report includes practical, evidence-based recommendations developed by reviewing the best available international research in consultation with a panel of experts.

Our Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants (2015) resources continue to be among our most-read. And this May we published two new reports focused on primary-age literacy, Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1 and Improving Literacy at Key Stage2. In fact, we mailed a copy of each to every single primary school in the country (along with a poster summarising our Teaching and Learning Toolkit). Our chief executive Kevan Collins introduced the guidance in a blog here.

You can see what other reports are in the pipeline here.

Assessing and Monitoring Pupil Performance

In December, we launched a new tool for teachers: our Assessing and Monitoring Pupil Progress guide, designed to aid assessment in a post-levels’ world. Divided into eight sections, this guide offers a starting point for those struggling to know what good practice might be.

Its co-author, Evidence Based Education’s Dr Stuart Kime, explains the thinking behind it in a blog-post here.

And if you haven’t yet read our review of the evidence on written marking, A Marked Improvement?, published last year, you can do so here.

Research Schools Network 

One of the most exciting developments this past year has been the launch of our Research Schools Network in partnership with the Institute for Effective Education. It’s now grown to 22 schools with many contributing insightful blogs reflecting on the challenges and opportunities of putting evidence into practice – for example, Aspirer Research School here and Huntington Research School here

Also well worth a read is Prof. Steve Higgins’ post, Research for Schools, explaining how to get the best out of our Teaching and Learning Toolkit and its Early Years companion

DIY Evaluation Guide

We re-launched our DIY Evaluation Guide last year as an interactive tool, introducing the key principles of educational evaluation and also providing practical guidance on how to conduct small-scale evaluations in schools, as well as early years and post-16 settings

Almost 800 of you have signed in to it, with 338 of you using it to investigate research questions of current interest to you, such as:

  • What impact does a programme of confident Year 5 readers reading one-on-one to a struggling Year 3 reader have?
  • What impact does a new constructive feedback programme have on year 7 maths progress?
  • What impact does attendance at intervention classes have for year 9 students?
  • What impact does individual mentoring have on Year 10 business studies students?
  • What is the impact of allowing Post 16 students to redraft their opinion articles based purely on peers’ critiques/​peer assessment?

There are two ways to use the DIY Evaluation Guide:

  1. You can simply read the different pages, using the information to help you inform your understanding of evaluation.
  2. Or you can use the box on the right of the page to conduct your own evaluation, by entering your details and keeping track of your progress. 

Either way, this is where you start.

Picture credit: Max Pixel