Description: Quantitative education and social research
About six months ago I released a paper ( https://johnjerrim.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/australia_asia_paper.pdf ) discussing reason for East Asian success in PISA, focusing largely upon the role of home background and culture. I have been somewhat overwhelmed by the number of people who have shown an interest in this paper and have contacted me about this work since. Today I will present some evidence on the other side of the story – the ‘impact’ of East Asian teaching methods on children’s mathematics te
Over the last two and a half years I have been evaluating the ARK ‘Maths Mastery’ programme along with Anna Vignoles from the University of Cambridge ( http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/vignoles/ ). This introduced a Singaporean inspired ‘mastery’ teaching approach into a selection of England’s primary and secondary schools, with the impact evaluated via a Randomised Controlled Trial methodology. The Education Endowment Foundation reports can be found here ( http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/p
The two trials were of reasonable quality, and produced some interesting results. They both pointed towards a small positive effect, though neither quite reached statistical significance independently. When combining the evidence across the two trials, we found children exposed to the programme made around a month more progress in mathematics than those who did not. To put this another way, the programme would move a child at the 50 th percentile (i.e. ranked 50 th in mathematics within a school of 100 chil