Changing how we think about ​‘what works’: Introducing our Core Components project

Over the last 15 years, the EEF has helped build a substantial evidence base around ​‘what works’ in education. We now have an opportunity to make even greater use of this knowledge.

Programmes are typically made up of multiple interacting elements – teaching strategies, resources, professional development, and implementation support. These are delivered and evaluated as a package, making it challenging to know which aspects are contributing to impact. By looking across evaluations, we can begin to understand the specific teaching and learning practices that underpin effective programmes. This is where our Core Components Project comes in.

From programmes to practices

‘Core components’ (sometimes called ​‘active ingredients’) are the observable elements of a programme that explain how and why it is expected to work. We can think of them as the programme’s building blocks.

Identifying these building blocks creates an opportunity to look beyond individual programmes and compare the practices they contain. To do this consistently, we need a shared language for describing and categorising programme components.

Consider these aspects of three different educational programmes:

• A teacher circulates the classroom and gives pupils ​‘live’ feedback as they complete a writing exercise in pairs.
• A teaching assistant provides in-the-moment praise and error correction while pupils read a book aloud.
• An adaptive tutoring programme gives immediate feedback as pupils work through maths problems.

On the surface, these may be part of very different programmes, in different subjects, delivered by different people. But at their core, they represent the same underlying component: providing information to pupils about their performance or understanding during a task.

Without a consistent way of describing components, these connections can be easily missed.

Introducing the EEF Teaching and Learning Taxonomy

The Teaching and Learning Taxonomy is a framework that breaks down programmes into meaningful, small units: components. The Taxonomy is currently made up of 78 components, organised into 12 dimensions (see below).

Each dimension contains a number of components.

For each component, we have developed a list of practice examples that illustrate how the component might appear in different types of programme and across Early Years, primary, secondary, and 16 – 19 contexts.

The figure below shows how one component – Visually representing concepts – fits within the taxonomy, from the overall dimension through to example classroom practices.

Having a taxonomy means we can describe programmes in terms of the practices they contain, rather than treating each programme as a single package. While the taxonomy doesn’t give us information on effective components on its own, it gives us the infrastructure we need to learn across programmes.

Putting the Taxonomy into practice

We have now used the taxonomy to ​‘tag’ over 180 EEF-evaluated programmes with the components they contain. Each of our evaluation reports has been coded independently by two people, with a sample of coding checked for consistency. We distinguished between:

• major components: central to a programme’s theory of change and
• minor components: those that play a supporting role

Here’s one example of how we use the taxonomy to describe a programme’s core components.

SPAtial Cognition to Enhance Mathematical Learning (SPACE)

SPACE is a programme developed to improve the spatial thinking and maths outcomes of Year 2 pupils through structured LEGO® sessions within maths lessons. We identified eight major components of SPACE, shown below.

Note: the above only shows the major components identified in SPACE. We also identified ten minor components. 

This gives a flavour of the level of detail we’re capturing for each programme. We think the Core Components Project could influence we synthesise, generate and mobilise evidence, which will support us to answer questions that are difficult to answer when programmes are treated as whole packages.

Why do core components matter for EEF?

• Synthesis. This is where we think the Project could have the biggest impact. We already bring together high-quality evidence through resources such as the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, but a core components approach allow us to go a step further. By comparing individual practices across many different programmes, we can start to identify which individual components, or combinations of components, appear most promising and in which contexts. This could also help us understand why some programmes, such as our Promising Programmes, have been particularly successful.
• Generation. Clearer reporting of what programmes actually involve supports implementation, replication, and future evaluation. Over time, what we learn from the Core Components project could also help us decide which approaches to test further through projects such as Teacher Choices or School Choices. Looking further ahead, building evidence about how individual components perform across different programmes and contexts could help inform the design and scale-up of future programmes.
• Mobilisation. The real value of this work lies in sharing what we learn with the sector. Understanding which parts of a programme contribute to its impact can support high-quality implementation. It can help schools and settings know what needs to be delivered as intended and what can be adapted to fit their context – an important part of the EEF’s guidance on effective implementation. Schools and settings cannot always adopt whole programmes. They may be costly, only available in particular contexts, or simply not be a good fit. By identifying the practices that sit within programmes and understanding which appear most promising, we can communicate insights that are more widely applicable and provide clearer, more actionable guidance.
  

What’s next?

We’ve now ​‘tagged’ 180+ EEF-evaluated programmes with their components, but this is just the beginning. We’re already exploring several ways to use the resulting dataset to generate new insights, including:

• Component Network Meta-Analysis (cNMA): working with WhatWorked Education to explore whether components can be modelled statistically across trials.
• Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA): investigating whether particular combinations of components are associated with more positive pupil outcomes.
• Generative AI: testing whether AI can identify programme components with similar accuracy to human coders, with the longer-term aim of applying the taxonomy to education research more broadly.

Ultimately, the Core Components Project could help us move beyond simply asking ​‘what works?’ towards understanding why programmes work, how they work, and how those insights can be applied more widely.