Education Endowment Foundation:The EEF Toolkit: bridging gap between educational research and classroom practice

The EEF Toolkit: bridging gap between educational research and classroom practice

EEF responds to TES article on Toolkit
Author
EEF
EEF
Press Release •1 minute •

The Sutton Trust – EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit summarises thousands of pieces of academic research and presents them in a practical, manageable and robust way. We believe this is the best way to get evidence into the classroom in ways that really make a difference – up to two-thirds of schools now use the Toolkit to help inform their decision-making, according to recent surveys

There are always risks involved in presenting so much complex information in an accessible way, some of which are addressed in this week’s TES magazine (10 March).

In response, Danielle Mason, the EEF’s Head of Research and Publications, comments:

The Teaching and Learning Toolkit draws on evidence from thousands of international education research studies. By combining many different impact estimates into a single estimates known as a meta-analyses, the Toolkit is designed to summarise a large body of research into a manageable amount of information. There are always risks involved in simplifying complex evidence in this way, but they’re outweighed by the huge value of presenting such a large amount of evidence to schools and teachers in an accessible and practical way. Before the Toolkit was launched in 2011, the chasm between educational research and classroom practice was huge. Our aim is to help bridge that gap.

The Toolkit is a live resource that we update with a team of academics at Durham University. This means that schools and teachers can be confident that when consulting the Toolkit they are always working with the most up-to-date and high-quality evidence.”

To find out more about how we deal with these issues, Steve Higgins, professor of education at Durham University, and one of the authors of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, has written a blog for our Research Schools Network which you can read here

You can also watch Professor Higgins’ presentation, How to give research results back to teachers’, here.