More than 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift offered up the wisdom that “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it”. So, we can’t say we weren’t warned about the threat of being hooked by catchy headlines that gloss over the reality. The equivalents of “fake news” and “clickbait” have always been with us. 

And yet we fall for it pretty consistently. We need to be particularly aware of this with research evidence in education. We need to dig beneath the
hype-fuelled headlines and not be sold on attractive quick fixes and fleeting fashions. 

Don’t get me wrong, I can see how complex psychological constructs become distilled into catchy labels like “grit” and “growth mindset”. But too often, while these
reader-attractive terms appear to be well understood, too few people actually drill down into the nuanced detail. The domain of “character education” is particularly prone to headline-grabbing interest, but the truth often limps along later with disappointing results. 

The hugely popular growth mindset phenomenon quickly proved attractive to many English schools, but how many people endeavoured to read beneath the headlines? Other leading academics like Robert Plomin have called out growth mindset as “bullshit”, stating: “Good interventions are the most expensive and intensive - if it were easy, teachers would have figured it out for themselves.”

The failure to replicate positive results is not limited to growth mindset interventions, of course - it is a worry that has beset many fields of research, including education. Psychology, which we draw on for many insights into the classroom, appears to be in the midst of a “replication crisis”. Be it “power posing to nail that job interview” or the “importance of resisting a marshmallow for young children”, the answers appear to be far more complicated than the compelling headlines suggest. 

From the hype to the humdrum

Elsewhere, with something like “project-based learning” (or PBL, for short) we see schools promised success with a radical new curriculum that is engaging and “just like the real world”. The humdrum truth, however, shown by an Education Endowment Foundation randomised controlled trial, is that even with the best possible supports, such exciting innovations flounder in the face of the complexity of our schools. 

So, what does this all mean for busy teachers and school leaders? Well, we need to resist the headline hype. We need to read the original research. We need to find out whether the exciting new evidence is replicated and corroborated by other research, or whether there is a literature review that does this synthesis for us. 

We need to know more about concepts like “controls” and “statistical power” before being sold on the latest “evidence-based” idea or intervention. In short, every school leader, and teacher, needs to tread carefully, so that we are not caught out when the “limping truth” catches up with us.

Alex Quigley is a senior associate for the Education Endowment Foundation, a former teacher and the author of Closing the Vocabulary Gap