New report highlights need for education based on what works

The Productivity Commission’s draft report into the evidence base for education is a useful document insofar as it provides an up to date overview of the types of data collected about the educational progress and outcomes of Australian children. However the report fails to adequately address the main problem with the evidence base in education: it is largely ignored by the education establishment.

The report makes some salient points. One, there has been little improvement in outcomes despite substantial increases in expenditure over the last decade — an additional $10 billion a year in real terms. Two, a considerable amount of data is collected, but there are ‘impediments’ to its access and use.

The report’s key recommendations are that data already collected should be more freely available for research purposes and that more data should be collected — particularly of a type that would allow fine-grained evaluations of ‘what works’ in the classroom to maximise outcomes.

There is nothing objectionable in those ideas. High quality, longitudinal research that measures the impact of programs, policies and practices on student learning growth is very valuable. However, the research will be pointless if the findings are not adopted because they do not align with the prevailing educational fixations and orthodoxies.

Explicit instruction is a case in point. Research strongly supports explicit teaching as more effective than ‘inquiry-based’ approaches, especially for teaching students new and complex concepts. The evidence base for explicit or ‘direct’ instruction extends over the past four decades.

Yet teacher education faculties and government departments are in the thrall of inquiry or discovery learning, in the mistaken belief that so-called 21^st Century skills such as innovation, problem-solving and creativity can be acquired without a solid foundation of knowledge.

Even more baffling is that schools continue to embrace expensive programs for which there is no good evidence of educational efficacy, such as the Arrowsmith program, which purports to ‘train the brain’ using computer software. This goes a long way to explaining why more spending has not translated into better outcomes.

Against this trend, Good to Great Schools Australia decided to implement a specific form of explicit teaching ― Direct Instruction ― in its Cape York Academies, based on the extensive research of its effectiveness and the urgent need for change in practice. Students in those schools are achieving better results than ever before. Yet these schools have been under constant criticism from far-removed education academics.

Another prime example is the essential role of systematic phonics instruction in learning to read. This is one of the most well-studied and well-supported findings in all education research and arguably all social sciences.

The importance of systematic phonics instruction has been repeatedly confirmed in numerous longitudinal experiments and in case studies of high-performing schools, reinforced in research reviews, and supported by the latest cognitive science research on how students learn to read.

Despite this wealth of evidence, phonics instruction is still contested. Almost all schools say they include phonics in their early literacy programs but it is rarely taught in the way that has been shown to be most effective―explicitly and systematically. Multiple surveys have found that knowledge of the language constructs that underpin phonics teaching is weak among teacher education students and new teachers.

In a recently published study by a Victorian research group, only 38% of Foundation (‘prep’) teachers correctly defined phonemic awareness―one of the fundamental aspects of initial reading instruction―yet most rated their ability to teach phonemic awareness as ‘very good’.

This is why a Year 1 phonics check is needed­, and it is endorsed in the Productivity Commission report. If educators cannot be swayed by the existing evidence base, accountability measures need to be employed to ensure children are learning this vital skill. What gets tested gets taught. Since the introduction of a Year 1 phonics check in schools in England, the number of children failing to reach the expected standard for reading in subsequent years has fallen by a third.

While there are schools around Australia that are doing exemplary work using evidence-based practice, unfortunately it is not the norm. More and better research is always welcome, particularly ‘gold standard’ studies that evaluate programs using experimental protocols such as randomised control trials.

The Evidence for Learning project is undertaking to fill this information gap. But the fact remains that we already know a lot about what works best. It just isn’t reaching classrooms.

Jennifer Buckingham is a senior research fellow and director of the FIVE from FIVE reading project at The Centre for Independent Studies. She is speaking at the Learning Difficulties Australia seminar, ‘Tales of the Reading Brain’ with Dr Maryanne Wolf in Sydney today.