Research, translated for the classroom.

Short, evidence-honest briefings on what the latest education research really means for teaching. Free to download and share.

Hands build understanding

Developing

Hands build understanding

In four US university physics experiments, learners who physically felt the forces of a spinning object scored significantly higher on a later quiz than those who only watched, an advantage explained by extra activity in the brain's movement and touch regions when they later reasoned about the same problem.

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Why mixing maths problems beats practising one type at a time

Firm

Why mixing maths problems beats practising one type at a time

A large classroom trial found Grade 7 maths learners who mixed practice problems scored 61% on a test a month later, against 38% for learners who practised one type at a time, though it took more time and the researchers flag real caveats.

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Asking learners “why” carries a real, moderate boost to learning

Developing

Asking learners “why” carries a real, moderate boost to learning

Asking learners to explain why a fact is true carries a real, moderate boost to learning (d = 0.56 across 254 comparisons and 2,138 learners), but the boost depends on how it's done: it's bigger when the explanation is precise, self-generated and builds on more prior knowledge, and it helps surface recall more reliably than deep understanding.

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The power of feedback: what almost 200 studies found

Developing

The power of feedback: what almost 200 studies found

Across 12 meta-analyses covering 196 studies, feedback averaged close to double the typical effect of a year's teaching. But the average hides the spread: feedback about the task and how to improve it sat among the strongest, while praise, rewards and punishment sat among the weakest.

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Practise the hard bit: what actually predicted better performance

Developing

Practise the hard bit: what actually predicted better performance

In a study of 17 advanced piano majors, practice time and the number of repetitions didn't predict next-day performance, but pinpointing and repeating the exact hard bit until it was fixed did.

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Talk that builds on ideas

Developing

Talk that builds on ideas

Building on and questioning earlier ideas were associated with higher maths and grammar scores when participation was broad. This study does not establish causation.

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Harder now, stronger later

Firm

Harder now, stronger later

Testing yourself on new material straight after learning it feels harder and produces worse recall minutes later. But in a classic memory study, the self-testers remembered 61% of a passage a week on, against 40% for learners who had just reread it four times, even though they had read it far fewer times.

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The four strands of oracy: what the evidence really shows

Developing

The four strands of oracy: what the evidence really shows

Researchers narrowed eight categories of talk skill down to four (physical, linguistic, cognitive, social and emotional) through three rounds with an eight-person expert panel, not by testing which categories were correct. Their own classroom trial afterwards was too small to prove any teaching approach worked better.

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Teach them to say "because"

Developing

Teach them to say "because"

Teach learners to always give a reason and expect one back: a ten-week UK primary programme built these habits through seven explicit ground rules, and learners' reasoning-linked talk nearly quadrupled, with a significant gain in individual test scores over a matched class, though the language count rested on very few groups and the class-level test gain fell short of significance.

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Close the book first

Developing

Close the book first

Not just answering questions, but answering them without the notes open, seems to be the useful part: university learners banned from checking their materials during weekly practice questions scored higher a week later (45% against 37%) and on the module exam two months later (61% against 48%) than classmates who could keep the book open, but this is one field experiment of 59 learners in two seminars, the same teacher taught both groups knowing who was who, and the researchers themselves cannot rule out that the closed-book group simply studied harder afterwards.

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Four moves that deepen classroom discussion

Developing

Four moves that deepen classroom discussion

A widely used classroom-talk guide distils decades of research into nine practical prompts for deepening discussion. Four of the simplest to start with: pause longer, ask for reasoning, invite a learner to add on, and check you've understood by restating it back.

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Teach at the edge of what they can do

Early signal

Teach at the edge of what they can do

Vygotsky illustrated his "zone of proximal development" idea with two children who tested at the same level working alone. With the same small amount of adult help, one reached problems pitched at twelve-year-olds, the other only nine-year-olds. It is his own worked example from a 1978 psychology text, not a controlled study, so it shows what he argued teaching should target, not what a trial proved.

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Why waiting a week to review new vocabulary beats reviewing it straight away

Developing

Why waiting a week to review new vocabulary beats reviewing it straight away

In one real classroom study, ten-year-olds who reviewed new vocabulary a week after first learning it recalled almost three times as many word meanings five weeks later than those who reviewed it again straight away, using exactly the same amount of teaching time.

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Don't overload working memory

Developing

Don't overload working memory

Across six experiments, splitting a diagram from its explanatory text only hurt learning when the two had to be mentally combined to make sense. When a diagram already explained itself, adding separate text made scores worse, not better, and simply merging the text onto the diagram didn't fix it.

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Spot the overload: a five-item working memory checklist for the classroom

Developing

Spot the overload: a five-item working memory checklist for the classroom

A two-year study of 524 six- to nine-year-olds found that five everyday classroom behaviours, not the original twenty-item checklist, reliably flagged working memory struggles still linked to weaker reading and maths eighteen months later.

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The small buzzer that helped learners steer their own attention

Early signal

The small buzzer that helped learners steer their own attention

Three 11-year-olds in a US special education classroom, each identified with speech, language, learning or emotional and behavioral needs, wore a small buzzer that vibrated every few minutes; each time it buzzed, they simply asked themselves whether they were paying attention and marked it down, and their time spent on task rose from a mean of 55% to more than 90% of the intervals observed.

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Support that fades

Early signal

Support that fades

In the study that coined the word "scaffolding", one tutor working one-to-one with 30 three- to five-year-olds gave direct, hands-on help twice as often to three-year-olds as to four-year-olds, and four times as often as to five-year-olds. Her help fell away as each child's own skill grew, but the study itself only describes this pattern; it does not prove that fading the help is what caused the skill to grow.

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Put the phone in another room

Developing

Put the phone in another room

A signal about visibility, not willpower: in two university experiments, a phone visible on the desk quietly narrowed people's working memory and reasoning even when nobody touched it or thought about it, but only "in another room" clearly beat "on the desk" (a phone in a pocket or bag landed in between and wasn't clearly different from either), and the effect hasn't shown up reliably in every later replication.

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Sustained shared thinking in early years settings

Developing

Sustained shared thinking in early years settings

In a study of England's most effective early years settings, staff and learners rarely stopped to really think something through together, but excellent settings did it significantly more than good ones, and when it happened, it extended what learners were thinking about.

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Why the same class scores lower as questions climb Bloom's ladder

Early signal

Why the same class scores lower as questions climb Bloom's ladder

In one university class, the same learners scored 80% on exam questions that only asked them to recall facts, 70% on questions asking them to explain ideas in their own words, and just 55% on questions asking them to apply that knowledge, one exam, one class, the mark falling as the thinking climbed the ladder from knowledge to comprehension to application.

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What makes CPD actually work

Developing

What makes CPD actually work

Across 104 randomised trials, CPD that built insight, set a goal, taught a technique AND helped teachers embed it in practice showed three times the average effect of CPD missing one of those four, though that headline gap comes from just nine studies and is not yet statistically secure.

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Oracy and historical thinking in Year 7

Early signal

Oracy and historical thinking in Year 7

In one trainee teacher's Year 7 class of 31, a structured debate pulled all but five learners into speaking aloud and the class changed its collective vote on the motion, after she gave them personas, named roles and paired rehearsal. A hopeful signal about oracy and historical thinking, not a measured trial.

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Retrieval practice and the maths achievement gap

Developing

Retrieval practice and the maths achievement gap

In two 13-week university maths courses, adding a short, unaided recall test at the end of every lesson was followed by the usual link between learners' starting knowledge and their results months later disappearing, while matched classes without the test kept that link firmly in place.

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Scaffolding professional vision in trainee teachers

Developing

Scaffolding professional vision in trainee teachers

A controlled study of 104 trainee teachers found that being given video models and prompts while they practised classroom "noticing" raised their motivation, but made no reliable difference to how mentally loaded the task felt. Only specific habits, taking notes and using prompts to manage the process, actually eased that load.

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Online paired reading and fourth-grade readers

Early signal

Online paired reading and fourth-grade readers

A signal about digital delivery, not proven superiority: over one term, 22 fourth-graders paired stronger and weaker readers together for 36 lesson hours of online paired-reading practice, and researchers reported improved reading fluency, comprehension and reading self-concept afterwards, but with no comparison class, an ordinary term's progress cannot be ruled out.

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Game-based learning and reading catch-up in Grade 3

Early signal

Game-based learning and reading catch-up in Grade 3

A signal about local games and struggling readers, not a tested method: after eight weeks of community-game reading lessons run by their own class teacher, all 36 learners in one Philippine Grade 3 class moved from below the pass mark to a class average of 'satisfactory' on a validated reading test, but there was no comparison class, so an ordinary term's progress cannot be ruled out.

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How primary teachers describe formative assessment

Early signal

How primary teachers describe formative assessment

A signal about belief and habit, not a tested method: in one Australian survey, 141 primary teachers described formative assessment in positive terms, occurring in both formal and informal, and both planned and unplanned forms, and the study's own authors call for strengthening more deliberate practice.

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Dialogic talk in the genre writing cycle

Early signal

Dialogic talk in the genre writing cycle

A signal about where talk shifts from teacher-led to learner-led, not proof it improves writing: interviewed about a national genre-writing programme, teachers of Years 5 and 6 described talk moving from teacher-led discussion of a shared text towards learner-led paired and group talk while jointly writing a new one, several linking this shift to EAL learners contributing more, but this is 26 teachers' own interview accounts, not classroom observation or a measure of children's writing.

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Building a slide up versus showing it all at once

Early signal

Building a slide up versus showing it all at once

A single experiment found that revealing a slide's images piece by piece, in time with the narration, helped Japanese university learners learn more and look at the relevant image sooner and longer than learners who saw the whole slide from the start, but it is one small study with adult learners, not yet tested in school classrooms.

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AI and the age gap in formative assessment

Early signal

AI and the age gap in formative assessment

A survey of 60 Kazakhstani English teachers found younger teachers reporting far higher use of every formative-assessment practice, including digital and AI tools, than colleagues aged 46 and over; the researchers argue AI could help close that gap, but they never tested whether it actually does.

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An AI-drafted study-skills curriculum

Early signal

An AI-drafted study-skills curriculum

A feasibility signal, not evidence of impact: when one US medical school sent 120 new medical learners an eight-week AI-drafted study-skills programme by email, PDF and podcast, two-thirds completed the follow-up survey and those who engaged more also rated it more useful, but engagement and perceived benefit were both self-reported on the same survey, with no comparison group and no measure of any actual change in study habits or grades.

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Wait time and the quality of classroom talk

Developing

Wait time and the quality of classroom talk

Not a new technique, a pause: when teachers hold silence after a question, and especially after a learner's first answer, for about three seconds rather than one, answers get longer, better reasoned and more widely shared. The pattern has held up for forty years across many classrooms, but the evidence behind it is older and softer than the size of the claim suggests.

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