Are you an enthusiastic adopter of Cognative Load Theory, interleaving or retrieval practice? Perhaps you are skeptical and think it might be yet another education fad? Here at CUREE we are neither - we like to evaluate the empirical and theoretical evidence and base policy and practice on what we discover. So, we are very pleased to be working with our partners at University of Birmingham and Queen Anne's School on a project for the Education Endowment Foundation to do exactly that.
So far we have looked at an initial 40,000 (!) publications on the topic and weeded this down to about 2,500 which might have a substantive evidence base behind it. Now we are applying some additional quality and Weight of Evidence tests, to winnow out the studies which tell us plausible and relevant things about the usefulness of these theories and techniques to educators.
In parallel, we are conducting a survey of practitioners to discover which of these approaches are in use in the real world and what those practitioners think of them. This is a very short, anonymous questionnaire and we would be delighted if you could take a few minutes to share your views and experiences in this area. And encourage your colleagues and friends in the profession to do do as well. The more people we hear from the better and more useful the results. Don't worry if you don't use these approaches or are doubtful about them - we want to hear from you too.
Thank you
Paul Crisp