The Evidence Base behind Attendance Interventions
The importance of attendance means that there is a growing demand for a review of the research into attendance interventions.
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by Durrington Research School
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Teachers up and down the country are starting to think, probably more than they should, about what their year 11 charges are doing when they are out of their sight and control. We all desperately hope that firstly, they doing some revision, and secondly, that what they are doing is worthwhile.
This anxiety can lead to last-minute Hail Mary attempts at year 11 revision interventions. I understand this compulsion completely. I generally mirror it in my personal life at this time of year by joining legions of wide-eyed shoppers scanning cleared-out Easter egg aisles on Good Friday (resorting finally to whichever cartoon character is out of favour this year). However, this time around, with year 11 intervention appearing on my list of responsibilities, I’ve attempted to be more methodical in my approach.
Over the past couple of years at Durrington we have increasingly used the lessons from cognitive science to inform the interventions we put in place to support year 11 revision. This year we have taken this a step further and attempted to fully immerse students, teachers and parents in the principles with the greatest weight of research evidence behind them. This blog is not so much an explanation of the principles (although there will be a couple of signposts for where you can find these), but more of an explanation of how we’ve tried to implement the use of them. Also, it does not cover all of the revision sessions, mentoring and other interventions running, purely how we tried to ensure our year 11s take an evidence-informed approach to their own revision.
The starting point was to find the best vehicle to deliver the ideas to our key stakeholders (by this I mean students, staff and parents/carers). We decided the most user-friendly and accessible version was that produced by the Learning Scientists. For those that have not seen their work, they define the six strategies for effective learning as: retrieval practice, spaced practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples and dual coding.
There are many excellent research papers which similarly give an overview of the cognitive science principles (Dunlosky and Deans For Impact provide two of the best) or alternatively an in-depth discussion of one or two.
However, if you want to communicate the ideas to stakeholders succinctly without the requirement to read an entire research paper, then the package the Learning Scientists put together is among the best.
I’m keen not to rose tint this blog too much, so one issue I would raise with the Learning Scientists’ work is that there is no obvious prioritising of the strategies. However, when you look at the research evidence behind them, retrieval practice and spaced practiced stand out above the others as the most effective. Therefore, we have had to ensure we have added this prioritisation into what we shared.
Above all else we have pursued the idea of multiple exposures with this intervention. Through sharing the strategies in as many formats and forums as we could, we have attempted to make the strategies a common language that is understood by all.
The different methods we have used have been:
Alongside all of this have been the corridor conversations, in-lesson plugging and general work of the Research School which has helped to give the strategies status and credence.
It would be easy to say the true measure of the success of this intervention will come through the GCSE results in the summer. However, we will be unable to separate out this intervention from all the other things year 11 have been doing. What consoles me though is that the research has largely been done on these strategies, therefore the onus is less on proving the effectiveness of the strategies and more on mobilising their use.
What we will do once year 11 finally put their pens down for the summer, is review each element, discuss and tweak and go again next year. Year 10 work is already well under way.
The importance of attendance means that there is a growing demand for a review of the research into attendance interventions.
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