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Education Interventions: From Lab to Classroom

Tuesday 24 July 2018, 11.00AM to 12.30pm

Speaker(s): Elizabeth Burroughs, Professor and Department Head, Department of Mathematical Sciences Montana State University and Hugues Lortie-Forgues, Lecturer in Psychology in Education Department of Education University of York

Elizabeth Burroughs, Professor and Department Head

Department of Mathematical Sciences Montana State University

Mathematics is a discipline that exists within a social context, a context that influences how the subject is taught and learned. Women’s performance in mathematics has been shown to be vulnerable to stereotype threat, and psychologists have developed interventions aimed at reducing the effect of stereotype threat on women’s mathematics performance. We conducted an experiment implementing interventions, shown to be effective at reducing gender stereotype threat in mathematics in a lab setting, in undergraduate calculus classrooms. We found that these interventions had no real effect in the classroom setting, leading to two important cautions. Lab settings differ from classroom settings in fundamental ways, limiting the ability to generalise inferences from lab studies to classroom settings. Furthermore, relying on large sample sizes to detect an effect masks the practical measure of a meaningful sample size, which is roughly the number of students in a particular instructor’s course at a given time.

Hugues Lortie-Forgues, Lecturer in Psychology in Education

Department of Education University of York

There are a growing number of large-scale Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in education. Considering their expense, it is important to reflect on the effectiveness of this approach. We surveyed all the large-scale RCTs commissioned by the EEF (UK) and the NCEE (US) that were aimed at improving academic achievement in K12 (112 RCTs; 741,593 students), to measure (a) the magnitude and precision of the effects produced by the interventions tested and (b) the proportion of effect that were statistically significant. Averaged effect sizes were smaller than what is typically observed in the academic literature. Moreover, these effect sizes sat within large confidence interval, meaning that the results were typically uninformative. Unsurprisingly, few of the findings were statistically significant. We argue that our field needs, as a priority, to understand why educational RCTs typically find small and non-significant effects.

Location: D/L/104, Derwent College, University of York