There are many moral duties that fall upon teachers. To be patient and kind, even when they’re at their wits’ end. To be fair and just in dealing with all manner of student behaviour. To pass on the values that will help shape the next generation into responsible, right-thinking adults. And according to Daniel Muijs, deputy director of research and evaluation at Ofsted, being properly informed about education research is also a moral duty. If we aren’t, he says, “we are letting down our children and we are letting down the society in which we work”.

But using research evidence effectively is not a simple process. Any finding has to be translated into your local context, which can be time-consuming and difficult, and ultimately, needs to result in a change to behaviour in the classroom.

Since 2011, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has been a leader in the movement to help schools and teachers become more evidence-informed. After receiving £125 million from the Department for Education, it has invested in a huge variety of projects, funding research and trying to find the best ways of getting the results used in practice.

The EEF is probably best known for its Teaching and Learning Toolkit (which rates the effectiveness of different interventions according to research) but it has also produced a huge amount of other material that is useful to teachers and schools trying to engage with research evidence.

Here are five resources that aren’t as well known but are just as deserving of wider consideration in using research to drive improvement.

1.The present picture

The EEF and education charity the Sutton Trust regularly quote the huge number of school leaders who use the Teaching and Learning Toolkit (74 per cent in April 2019) but my first recommended resource offers a different perspective. Teachers’ Engagement with Research: what do we know? A research briefing includes the results of a 2017 survey of 1,670 teachers, which found that they were much more likely to draw ideas and support from their own experiences (60 per cent of respondents identified “ideas generated by me or my school”), or the experiences of other teachers (42 per cent of respondents identified “ideas from other schools”) when deciding on approaches to support pupil progress.

Non-research-based continuing professional development (CPD) was also cited as an important influence (54 per cent of respondents identified “information from CPD” and, of these, 84 per cent said that the CPD was based on information other than academic research).

The report suggests that “there has been no particular growth in the use of research evidence as a source of influence in school decision-making” since a similar survey was carried out three years ago.

So, what does this mean? First, it should put a stop to any complacency from those of us who want to see education become an evidence-informed profession. It is far from a done deal.

Second, if you worry that you are missing the research bandwagon, you are not alone. But it also suggests that we’re unlikely to get to a situation where schools and teachers simply follow evidence-based guidelines and checklists produced from on high. Humans don’t work like that.

Education is often compared with medicine, as if that is a perfectly performing profession, yet medicine similarly struggles with the ways that humans adopt new behaviours and approaches. Doctors, just like teachers, draw on their own experiences and that of colleagues, and incorporate new evidence into their existing expertise in ways that are not always logical.

Our methods of weaving new ideas into practice need to be carefully considered if more schools are to become evidence-informed. In what ways are the opinions and ideas of colleagues and other schools guided (or not) by the research evidence? And if they are informed by research, how reliable is it?

2. Know the limitations

The amount of robust research evidence available, particularly on issues of practical importance to teachers and schools, is still pretty low. Of the headline practices in the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, the ratings for more than a third are based on limited evidence or less (and this includes some important topics, such as teaching assistants, setting and streaming, and the built environment). In the Early Years Toolkit, more than half of the topics have only limited evidence or less.

This is frustrating but there is a silver lining, as demonstrated by A Marked Improvement? A review of the evidence on written marking. This 2016 EEF publication found that the quality of evidence focused on written marking was low, stating that “this is surprising and concerning, bearing in mind the importance of feedback to pupils’ progress and the time in a teacher’s day taken up by marking”.

But for many teachers, this report is not concerning but liberating - even inspiring. It allows them to challenge the certainty of school policies (and the resulting workload), supported by the uncertainty of the evidence.

We should be rightly concerned about the use of practices that research has shown to be ineffective (such as Brain Gym). But where the evidence is lacking, there is an opportunity. If there’s no evidence to support the usefulness of a practice - particularly one that adds to workload - it’s a chance for teachers and schools to challenge whether it is worth the effort.

This is where the contrast between “evidence-informed” and “evidence-based” is clearest. We want practice to incorporate the best evidence with professional expertise. If there is strong, compelling evidence,then there is an argument for basing your practice on it. When the evidence is weak, your practice may be informed by it but your own professional expertise (and that of others) should take precedence.

The review also concludes that it is important for teachers and schools to evaluate what they are doing. However, this raises the question of how this can be achieved. Researchers might be encouraged to research an area but what role can teachers and schools play? How can they know whether what they are doing is gold dust or fool’s gold? When making a change (whether research-inspired or not) it can be surprisingly difficult to evaluate the impact, which leads us to our next resource.

3. What works in your school?

Schools collect a lot of data but it can sometimes be difficult to see the wood for the trees. It’s better, then, to first consider the question that you want answering and collect the data that can help you to answer it.

The EEF’s DIY Evaluation Guide can help here, offering a framework for evaluating change within your school. The EEF’s website has an interactive tool to update as your project progresses (although it’s not the simplest to navigate, so the PDF version, written by Durham University and the EEF, may be more useful).

Many schools have been able to run these kinds of evaluations with incredible success. At the Institute for Effective Education, we have supported 30 school-led projects to run small-scale evaluations that have produced interesting results on topics such as knowledge organisers, times tables fluency and retrieval practice. But we know that this approach can feel difficult for schools to carry out without support.

It is, however, deceptively simple. You are trying to design a fair test of your new approach against an existing one, creating an experiment that is unbiased towards each approach. Areas that schools have found challenging include developing a clearly defined question to answer, being precise about what the proposed change will actually do, and carrying out objective tests at the beginning and end of a project in order to measure what has changed on the particular outcome that is being targeted.

The last of these, in particular, surprised me. I had assumed that there would be plenty of valid and reliable tests available in schools but this is not the case, which brings me to my next resource.

4. A perspective on progress

The Assessing and Monitoring Pupil Progress Guide provides a valuable overview of the problems with assessment, if not necessarily all of the answers. It describes assessment as “one of the great unclaimed prizes of learning” but acknowledges “ensuring that assessment is efficient, effective and without bias is a considerable challenge”.

The section on the value of standardised tests is particularly useful, explaining that while tests are more reliable and objective than teacher assessments, they are also costly to develop and usually measure a limited range of attributes and characteristics.

As a result, they are somewhat thin on the ground. This makes it more difficult for schools to assess the impact of changes on academic outcomes.

There is still an unclaimed prize here, in the development of more standardised, low-stakes tests on academic outcomes. Schools could use these tests purposefully to test the impact of different approaches and, perhaps, share their findings with other schools.

5. It’s not all about academics

Academic success is important, but schools also have a duty to nurture non-cognitive skills. Stress and anxiety levels among young people are on the rise, and it’s crucial to help students develop metacognitive skills and strategies for coping and being resilient.

Capturing student scores on these kinds of measures can tell you whether there have been changes in your student population over time and if any interventions are making a difference. And for these non-cognitive outcomes, there are plenty of validated, low-cost (or free) tools that you can use, including the EEF’s Spectrum Database.

This online tool lists 86 measures covering topics including emotional intelligence, mental health and metacognition. They span key stages 1-4 and you can filter the list according to these (and other) criteria, in order to find tests that measure the non-cognitive outcome you’re interested in with the age group you’re working with.

It’s a useful and, I suspect, under-utilised resource, allowing schools to understand their students objectively in different ways. Since they are usually self-reports, they shouldn’t be used in a high-stakes manner but can be explored with purpose. Schools so often spend time collecting reams of data that may not be reliable or even useful, yet here is an unexplored avenue that focuses on attributes that are of real interest in supporting children.

Becoming a more evidence-informed teacher can be empowering, allowing you to explore issues that are of particular interest in your local context. For many of these, there may not be ready-made evidence-based answers that are in a fit state to implement. Yet, as we have seen, there are useful resources available to support you as you make your own enquiries.

The EEF has learned much about evidence-informed practice, its continuing challenges and uncertainties, and the resources it has created along the way offer different ways of engaging with this agenda. It is an agenda that, if it not yet offering guaranteed success, nevertheless provides external evidence, challenges and perspectives that enable teachers to improve their practice in a measured, sustainable way.

Jonathan Haslam is the director of the Institute for Effective Education. 

This article originally appeared in the 2 AUGUST 2019 issue under the headline “5 of the best”