As professional educators, we are constantly in search of powerful strategies that have a tangible impact on student learning.  Given the limited amount of instructional time we have to work with students who struggle with learning challenges, we must also be mindful of how we choose to spend those precious instructional minutes.  While the 21st Century World has provided us with unprecedented access to a vast number of resources on effective pedagogy, many teachers struggle to pare that professional advice down to a practical number of highly impactful strategies.

Researchers such as John Marzano, John Hattie, Karen Harris and Steve Graham have attempted to address this concern by identifying highly effective, evidence-based practices through their own meta-analytical research.  Meta-analysis is the statistical examination of a collection of individual studies.  The effect size of these studies indicates the level of impact that particular strategies have on student learning.  Generally accepted guidelines for interpreting effect size (ES) would be as follows:

– ES of .2 = a relatively small impact

– ES of .5 = a moderate impact

– ES of .8 or higher = has a large impact.

Here’s an example of the kinds of things educators can learn from meta-analyses.  One very revealing meta-analysis in secondary education (Scruggs, Mastropieri, Berkeley, Graetz, 2010) found two categories of interventions to be particularly impactful on student learning: mnemonic strategies and explicit instruction.

Mnemonic strategies, or memory aids, were found to be highly effective and generalizable across academic content settings (ES=1.47).  Many educators are familiar with the classic use of mnemonics like PEMDAS to recall the order of operations in math or ROY-G-BIV to memorize all the colors in the spectrum.  However, effective mnemonic strategies are not used just for rote memorization of facts.  Fluent recall of content area vocabulary should be seen as an important part of increasing (not replacing) student capacity for building deeper conceptual understanding (Putnam, Deshler & Schumaker, 1992).  Mnemonic strategies can also be used to recall and apply learning processes.  One example of this would be the DISSECT word identification strategy.  The POW+TREE and RAFT strategies support students with remembering key steps in the writing process.  The LINCS strategy helps students memorize and recall new content vocabulary.  (See School Tool above.)

Explicit Direct Instruction was also shown to have a very substantial impact on the learning of students with disabilities (ES=1.68).  EDI is a collection of instructional practices that combine together to create well-crafted lessons that explicitly teach grade level skills and content.  Components of a well-designed lesson include:  a clear objective, activation of prior knowledge, a description of the lesson’s importance, concept development, guided practice, independent practice and lesson closure.  In an effective EDI lesson, teachers consistently explain, demonstrate, model and then check for student understanding (Hollingsworth and Ybarra, 2009).

It is of the utmost importance that we provide students with disabilities access to rigorous and challenging curricula.  Given the high expectations that continue to anchor student learning in our state, it is good to know that educators can use meta-analytical research to select effective, evidenced-based strategies that consistently and reliably improve student learning.

References:

Hollingsworth, J. & Ybarra, S., Explicit Direct Instruction, The Power of the Well-Crafted, Well-Taught Lesson, (2009).

Putnam, M.L., Deshler, D. D., & Schumaker J. B. (1992), The investigation of setting demands:  A missing link in learning strategy instruction. In L. Meltzer (Ed.) Strategy assessment and instruction for students with learning disabilities:  From theory to practice.  Austin, TX :  Pro-Ed.

Scruggs, S. E., Mastropieri, M. A.,Berkley, S., Graetz, J. E., (2010). Do Special Education Interventions Improve Learning of Secondary Content? A Meta-Analysis.  Remedial and Special Education, Nov/Dec, Vol. 31, 6 437-449.