The next four posts in our blog discuss
the development of statistical research methods by a team at the Durham
Research Methods Centre in collaboration with the Education
Endowment Fund to analyse data from Randomised Control Trial in
Education. This post gives you some background of this research.
Educational inequality has been
identified as a global challenge for at least the rest of this century. Even in
wealthier countries, there is considerable variation in how large the gap is in
the educational achievement of children from rich and poor families. UNICEF’s
report, An Unfair Start, looks at educational
inequalities in 41 of the world’s richest countries, covering inequalities from
access to early childhood education to expectations of post-secondary
education. The UK ranks 16th from the top (least unequal) in terms of
educational inequality throughout secondary school years but comes 23rd in
inequalities during primary school years.
Recent UK governments have been
determined to tackle this challenge. For example, the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) was set up under the Child Poverty Act in
2010. The Commission’s review, reflecting on twenty
years of political commitment to tackle the challenge, was not optimistic. It
gave an amber warning for two life stages, early years and schools; and a red
warning for young people and working lives - a disadvantage hard to tackle. The
slightly better position of early years and schools reflects greater investment
and commitment to these stages. The Pupil Premium was introduced in 2011 as a
dedicated allocation to individual schools to tackle educational disadvantage.
Schools now get £1,345 for every primary age pupil who claims or has recently
claimed Free School Meal (FSM), or £955 for every secondary age pupil. This amounts now to about
2.4 billion pounds per year, from an initial allocation of £625 million in 2011
with a total of over £20 billion spent since the policy was introduced.
Another initiative of government
strategy was establishing the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in 2011 and
later identifying it as the ‘What Works’ Centre for Schools as a means to support schools in
allocating their Pupil Premium effectively.
One of the current efforts to reduce
educational inequality is aimed to find interventions that can support the
teaching of underachieving pupils in schools. In England, EEF has funded 150
trials of educational interventions, involving well over a million pupils in
schools. The evaluation of these interventions has been supported by vigorous
growth across the world in the use of robust evaluation methods in education;
of particular note is the use of randomised controlled trials (RCT) (Connolly et al., 2018). Robust evaluation of policy interventions has
become popular partly because there is an increasing need to justify public
spending by focusing on policies which have been shown to work, but there is
also a desire to get better value from educational research itself (Sanderson, 2002), to control access
to political capital and resources (Corduneanu-Huci et al., 2020) and even, perhaps, to control what happens in schools.
Durham University has been
collaborating with the Education
Endowment Foundation since its inception
in 2011. A particularly productive area of collaboration is the development of the
teaching and learning toolkit, the EEF Database, NPD analysis, and data archive
from 2018-2021. This project was led by Professor Steve Higgins, and it was
broadly divided into two collaborative research groups; the Database Group
which focuses on teaching and learning toolkit, and the Archive Group which
focuses on the novel application and development of methods to evaluate
interventions in educational trials. Our work focuses on developing methods to
generate robust evidence regarding which intervention improves educational
outcomes, synthesis of evidence from multiple trials using raw data instead of
summary statistics, and developing new metrics for communicating evidence in
education. The following set of blogs are the highlights of the methodological
research from the Archive Group. Bilal’s blog will introduce Individual Participant Data (IPD) meta-analysis methods
to synthesise evidence from several trials funded by Education Endowment
Foundation. Germaine’s blog will provide an overview of how to use
Bayesian posterior probability instead of p-value. Akansha’s blog will provide an
overview of our methodological work on the correct model specification and
estimation of effect size in multisite
educational trials. Lastly, Dimitris’s blog will introduce
eefAnalytics package in R and Stata software. This package contains
suites of functions for design-driven analysis of randomised controlled trials.
This blog is co-authored by Adetayo Kasim, the Director of Durham Research Methods
Centre and a Professor of statistics in the Department of Anthropology;
and Steve Higgins, a fellow of Durham Research
Methods Centre and a Professor of Education in the School of Education.
This blog expresses the author’s views and interpretation of comments made during the conversation. Any errors or omissions are the author's.
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