Strengthening the Research Base That Informs STEM Instructional Improvement Efforts: A Meta-Analysis

Lynch, Karen E.; Hill, Heather C.; Gonzalez, Kathryn; Pollard, Cynthia

doi:10.3102/0162373719849044

Cited by 74 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Even among measures of student achievement, effect sizes for researcher-designed and specialized topic tests aligned with the treatment are often 2 to 4 times larger than effects on broad standardized state tests (Cheung & Slavin, 2016; Hill et al, 2008; Lipsey et al, 2012; Lynch et al, 2019). These larger effects on researcher-designed, specialized assessments can be misleading when they reflect narrow, nontransferable knowledge.…”

Section: Five Guidelines For Interpreting Effect Sizesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions

Kraft

2020

Educational Researcher

690

544

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Researchers commonly interpret effect sizes by applying benchmarks proposed by Jacob Cohen over a half century ago. However, effects that are small by Cohen’s standards are large relative to the impacts of most field-based interventions. These benchmarks also fail to consider important differences in study features, program costs, and scalability. In this article, I present five broad guidelines for interpreting effect sizes that are applicable across the social sciences. I then propose a more structured schema with new empirical benchmarks for interpreting a specific class of studies: causal research on education interventions with standardized achievement outcomes. Together, these tools provide a practical approach for incorporating study features, costs, and scalability into the process of interpreting the policy importance of effect sizes.

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Section: Five Guidelines For Interpreting Effect Sizesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions

Kraft

2020

Educational Researcher

690

544

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“…The teachers in this study did not participate in professional development associated with the curriculum, but we can still envision a way that both the framework we have proposed and the insights it provided us about this particular curricular unit could inform future work around teacher learning. We know that we need a well-designed curriculum and professional development to help teachers understand and implement the complex vision of the NGSS (Lynch et al, 2019). In addition, there is evidence that professional development focused on teachers' adaptation of existing materials can be effective in supporting desired instructional reforms (Penuel et al, 2011).…”

Section: Teacher Professional Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redesign or relabel? How a commercial curriculum and its implementation oversimplify key features of the NGSS

2020

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The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requires many teachers to drastically change their classroom instruction. Curricular materials offer a tool to support this transition, but there are questions about the degree to which available curricula truly reflect the shifts required by the NGSS. This study proposes a framework of four key elements of NGSS design that can be used to analyze both curriculum and instruction for alignment to the NGSS. The four key elements include phenomenonbased, three-dimensional, supports student epistemic agency, and coherent. We used this analytic framework to analyze one commercially available middle school curriculum and its implementation in two classrooms. We found that the curriculum and instruction oversimplified the complex vision of science learning required by using natural phenomena primarily as hooks or examples, creating lessons in which students engaged in core ideas and science practices but separately in service of different goals, placing the cognitive load on the teacher to do most of the sensemaking rather than the students, and having the teacher, rather than the students, build coherence between the lessons. Our work suggests that future curriculum should focus on asking students to tell a how and why story around a phenomenon to support threedimensionality, student epistemic agency, and coherence. Furthermore, future work should explore how educative

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“…Prompted by this larger and more rigorous pool of studies, a new meta-analytic review synthesized updated research evidence on instructional improvement programs in STEM (Lynch, Hill, Gonzalez, & Pollard, 2019). First, we sought to understand how effective STEM PD and curriculum improvement programs are on average at improving student outcomes.…”

Section: Impacts On Distal Outcomes: Student Achievementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Subsequent analyses then examined whether instructional improvement programs with specific features posted larger effects on student achievement. (See the full report for details; Lynch et al, 2019. ) Typical STEM PD and curriculum interventions improved student achievement by about 8 percentile points (+0.21 standard deviations).…”

Section: Impacts On Distal Outcomes: Student Achievementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strengthening STEM Instruction in Schools: Learning From Research

Lynch

Hill²,

Gonzalez³

et al. 2019

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences

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More than half of U.S. children fail to meet proficiency standards in mathematics and science in fourth grade. Teacher professional development and curriculum improvement are two of the primary levers that school leaders and policymakers use to improve children’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning, yet until recently, the evidence base for understanding their effectiveness was relatively thin. In recent years, a wealth of rigorous new studies using experimental designs have investigated whether and how STEM instructional improvement programs work. This article highlights contemporary research on how to improve classroom instruction and subsequent student learning in STEM. Instructional improvement programs that feature curriculum integration, teacher collaboration, content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and how students learn all link to stronger student achievement outcomes. We discuss implications for policy and practice.

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Strengthening the Research Base That Informs STEM Instructional Improvement Efforts: A Meta-Analysis

Cited by 74 publications

References 77 publications

Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions

Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions

Redesign or relabel? How a commercial curriculum and its implementation oversimplify key features of the NGSS

Strengthening STEM Instruction in Schools: Learning From Research

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