Study

published:August 2009

How did teachers broaden and extend the curriculum to engage learners more effectively?
In compiling this RfT summary we looked at a range of studies from the United States and the UK which focused on teachers’ planning and implementation of the curriculum. In doing so we found evidence in the studies of a number of aspects of teachers’ planning and practice that were effective in engaging pupils and raising achievement. These examples demonstrated:

• context based teaching that explored phenomena in real or simulated situations
• inclusive teaching and learning and citizenship education that connected with the students’ community beyond the school
• collaborative learning and structured challenge in group work which were effective learning strategies
• structured learning that focused and built on students’ existing concepts and understandings, rather than 'teaching to the test', as an important foundation for progression
• removing rigidity in the approach to the curriculum, which allowed time and space for conceptual development and encouraged integration of cross‐curricular learning, and
• that teachers need to have a deep knowledge and understanding of the subject matter in order to be able to support children’s learning through the use of appropriate teaching and learning strategies.

We explore these key features in the following sections using our chosen studies to illustrate curriculum planning and delivery in a wide range of contexts. Some of the studies appear more than once as they are relevant to more than one of the six key features.

How did real-life contexts lend variety and interest to the curriculum?
The studies highlighted a wide range of examples of context-based teaching that linked to students’ knowledge and experience of everyday life. These approaches were helpful for making the curriculum more relevant, benefiting all students, particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds and those feeling demotivated by the conventional curriculum. Examples illustrating context-based approaches to the curriculum included:

• using conflict between the characters in a play as a way of bringing key features of human genetics to life as well as its implications for society
• setting physics learning in the context of technology in daily life and society
• providing students with 'Fat and the Slim' – a modular programme that covered topics such as digestion, structure of fats and sugars in the contexts of anorexia and obesity
• organising a flower show to provide a context for developing group problem-solving skills, and
• second- language learners listening to one familiar (a well known rock band) and one unfamiliar (a gold rush) topic of equal length – they produced more correct responses about the familiar topic.

For example, one study (Black & Goldowsky) showed how students in a US high school found  the use of drama, with characters using everyday language, helped to bring key points of human genetics to life. The proportion of students who could effectively describe and explain genetic mapping and its implications, and present reasoned argument rose significantly as a result.

In another study (Wierstra) Dutch teachers used an enquiry approach to physics teaching and learning for secondary students set in the context of technology in daily life and society. They constructed study units around themes such as, 'traffic and safety' and 'energy at home'. Being able to draw on a range of contexts for learning physics ideas provided the teachers with considerable flexibility in meeting the varying needs of their students, thereby promoting inclusion. Questionnaire evidence and test data suggested that the approach was effective in promoting higher levels of cognitive achievement and in enhancing students’ enjoyment and attitudes towards the subject.

You may like to read a case study which describes embedding learning about literacy and writing in a real-life context, a local restaurant. For details of the other examples mentioned above and in other sections of this summary, you may like to look at the ‘review of individual studies from systematic reviews’ on the QCDA website (see further reading).

What effect did linking to young people’s experiences of home and community have on pupils’ learning?
Inclusive teaching and learning and citizenship education that connected with the students’ community beyond the school made a difference to student learning. There were many ways in which this was done including relating the curriculum to students’ personal experiences, and involving parents in their children’s learning.

Examples of learning experiences linked to the wider community included:

• helping young people develop as responsible citizens, gain a sense of the ethic of service, and feel a sense of accomplishment
• learning at home that encouraged interactions between parent and child, such as supporting reading activities, so helping to improve pupils’ self-esteem and achievement, and
• using money at home to learn mathematics.

‘Community Connection’, a programme from the US helped young people develop as responsible citizens, gain a sense of the ethics of serving others, and feel a sense of accomplishment (Garcia-Obregon et al). The programme aimed at keeping students in schools and provided opportunities for students to form ties with the community through service. The key point about the service learning was that it was carefully worked out so that curriculum learning aims were threaded into the community activities. The results revealed that students made gains in areas of reading and mathematics and developed greater self-confidence as well as learning how communities work. 

Another study (Tizard et al) described how parents in a London borough shared reading activities with their primary aged children. Parents were encouraged to listen to their child reading several times a week and researchers visited them at home several times during the year. The researchers worked hard at developing relationships with the parents. They met them at parents’ evenings, at home and at the school gate and occasionally helped parents where necessary. Those pupils who were in the ‘home collaboration’ group, showed a clear improvement in their ability to read and understand what they had read. The study also showed that home collaboration made a greater contribution to children’s reading skills than extra support from teachers. For more details see Tizard’s study.

Other Research for Teachers summaries have explored ways of involving parents, such as through setting interactive homework activities specifically designed to promote conversations between children and their parents at home in summaries about parental involvement and home school knowledge exchange.

You may like to read a case study that shows another way of connecting with pupils’ community beyond school –  primary pupils worked with their teachers and outside partners to produce a film about citizenship.

What was the impact on pupils of a curriculum based on structured dialogue and group work?
The studies showed that collaborative learning and structured challenge through group work were effective curriculum experiences that involve learning strategies. However, they also showed that effectiveness depended on teachers providing clear guidance for group working, and designing tasks and activities that helped students develop the skills they needed to work collaboratively in a productive way.

The impact of structured group work was in contrast to less effective curriculum experiences where learning was not collaborative and where there was no specific requirement that students worked together. In such contexts, even though they were organised into groups, the students tended to work individually, albeit side by side, on tasks for their own ends. We explored effective ways of structuring group work in our earlier summary Raising achievement through group work.

Some studies described how teachers made group work collaborative by structuring activities that encouraged learner voice, promoted learning interactions and generated effective patterns of discussion. These included:

• the TRAC (Talk, Reasoning and Computers) programme which promoted ground rules and awareness of language use to develop pupils’ reasoning and collaboration skills
• a ‘Physics Curriculum Development Project’ which promoted inquiry learning, and
• a programme that involved training students to be peer tutors in mathematics.  

In the TRAC programme (Mercer et al) the teachers took the children through a series of lessons to show how the rules worked. The rules were based on evidence about building exploratory talk, in which partners engage critically, but constructively with each other's ideas. In exploratory talk, statements and suggestions are offered for joint consideration. These may be challenged and counter challenged but challenges are justified and alternatives are offered. Children’s use of language and problem solving scores increased when compared with control groups. Our earlier RfT Raising achievement through group work explores how teachers promoted exploratory talk through establishing ground rules in more detail.

Wiejstra’s study of the Dutch Physics Curriculum Development project described a programme of lessons that were inquiry-based and actively involved students. They worked in small groups, choosing their own topic of enquiry, including planning and carrying out experiments. The study showed that the more inquiry-based the classroom environment, the more favourable the pupils’ attitude to physics, and the greater the cognitive achievement.

In another study (Fantuzzo et al) pupils showing poor performance in maths were randomly split into three groups: one with home-based parental involvement plus reciprocal peer tutoring; one with parental involvement without the peer tutoring and one group with neither. Pupils involved in peer tutoring were put into pairs and trained to take on alternating roles as teacher and student for tackling mathematical problems.  Pupils who took on the role of the teacher had to keep their students on task, give prompts and provide praise and encouragement. They had to observe their peers working and coach them to try better strategies. The group with both home-based parental involvement and peer tutoring achieved higher assessment scores in mathematics although both the parental involvement groups showed higher self esteem.

You may like to read a case study that illustrates the effective use of dialogue and group work in a mathematics context.

How important was building on pupils’ existing understandings?
In line with other research, particularly in science and mathematics, the studies showed how pupils bring their own everyday understandings to school with them. (See for example our earlier RfT about learning science). These ‘alternative’ conceptions can provide helpful starting-points from which to build new, more complete and accurate understandings. Starting from what pupils know and can do already is explicit or implicit in many approaches to learning highlighted as effective, including, for example, structuring group discussions, which we described in the previous section.

Interventions that helped teachers build incrementally on pupils’ existing beliefs included:

• engaging students in thinking about their learning in ecology, by asking students to consider whether and how the ideas fitted their existing beliefs
• teachers finding out what their students already know about chemical reactions and then building on it in order to help students go from concrete to abstract understanding
• using Chinese students’ pre-existing knowledge to interpret the text and to create expectations of what they are about to hear/read in learning English, and
• using pupils’ existing experience and knowledge to help them gain greater understanding of what learning is all about, through tackling questions such as ‘How is the writing they do inside of school like the writing they do for other reasons?’  

One study (Blank) explored the effect of building in structured opportunities for students to reflect on their thinking in their learning about how living things gained energy in food webs. Teachers probed their students’ prior knowledge and beliefs through prompting them to ask themselves a number of questions, such as whether what they were learning:

• made sense to them
• gave them ideas for investigations, and
• helped them to solve new, challenging problems about living communities.  

The study showed that the beliefs students brought in from everyday life were initially difficult to shake off even when they were presented with scientifically accurate data. But tests held later on showed significant gains for the students who had taken part in the thinking skills approach. They were observed to be much more critical of their own and others’ views, and discussion was livelier. Recordings of their dialogue showed that it was extended, and that students listened to each other and gave reasons for their suggestions.

Another study (Strang & Shayer) looked at the application of thinking skills to the teaching of chemical reactions and equations to 14 year olds. Teachers identified any conceptual difficulties students had with the work during initial discussions with individual students. These difficulties included not understanding that the overall mass does not change during a chemical reaction or that gases have mass.  They then specifically designed lessons in ways that supported the students in dealing with these difficulties, particularly going from what they observed to the underlying theory. The lessons involved experimental work and discussion, during which the teacher asked questions directed at the conceptual difficulties the students had shown earlier, but did not provide answers. By the end of the study the students’ test scores were around 20% higher than the scores of a comparison group which did not receive the intervention.   

You may like to read a case study that shows how teachers built on pupils’ existing knowledge and understanding to develop their thinking about science concepts.

How did flexibility in curriculum design help to encourage learning across the curriculum?
There were many examples in the studies of effective curriculum design that showed subject teachers developing flexible, inclusive and appropriate learning experiences. Whilst the content was related to particular subject matter, the core learning experiences were, in many cases, transferable across the curriculum. Examples of such cross-curricular strategies included:

• the use of drama to help students understand the issues involved in human genetics and its implications
• a cross-curricular approach to understanding personal relationships in a history project that involved a number of subjects, and
• a study of nature led by a science and an art teacher.

Black and Goldowsky’s study showed how drama was used to convey science content about genetics and ethical questions. A play was used to make the complex issue of mapping human genes more real and effectively linked ethical and scientific issues. Such key issues included do we want to know our genetic make-up, and if it points to serious disease, how should our knowledge be used in an ethical society? Having characters students could recognise helped them relate more easily to the debate. The study showed that drama helped to bring key points of learning to life thus lending itself to cross-curricular approaches.

'Facing History and Ourselves' (Beyer & Presseisen), was an interdisciplinary programme involving a study of persecution during World War II, which helped to develop middle and high school students' critical thinking abilities. The programme involved teachers from literacy, history, French, mathematics, science and art/music working together with support from a consultant. Each department gave students the chance to experience how minorities were treated during World War II through the medium of their particular subjects. Students not only gained in historical knowledge of the period, but showed an improved ability to reason about human relationships and the implications of one's actions.

Another programme (Williams et al), which was run by a science and art teacher, involved 16-18 year olds in learning outside the classroom. Activities included hiking, animal studies, and real world science. Sometimes students worked in teams. This enabled them to tackle challenges and tasks that were greater than the ones individual students could achieve by themselves. For example, on a survival activity students worked in groups, using a map and compass to find their way. For another survival assignment, students were given the task of collecting 100 different plants, labelling them and presenting them in an aesthetically pleasing way. Virtually all the students on the programme said that it made learning and school more enjoyable. 

You may like to read a case study in which art and ICT were brought together to create an effective teaching and learning approach to the study of paintings in an art gallery.

How important was subject knowledge and CPD for wide-ranging curriculum design?
The studies showed that teachers needed deep knowledge and understanding of the subject matter to help them to support students’ learning through appropriately matched teaching and learning strategies. Teachers needed to draw on both their subject knowledge and their experience and knowledge of learning in order to make their planning and delivery of the curriculum more effective. Professional development was central to this process.

Programmes which showed the importance of teachers’ professional knowledge and understanding of children’s thinking in the subject included programmes which developed teachers’ knowledge and understanding of:

• the different kinds of talk that children use and how to develop more productive forms of talk
• thinking skills and cognitive acceleration
• interactive whole class teaching, and
• children’s thinking in mathematics.

The Talk, Reasoning and Computers (TRAC) programme (Mercer  et al)  helped teachers to support their pupils in moving towards exploratory talk – a way of interacting which emphasises reasoning, the sharing of relevant knowledge and working collaboratively. It was important that teachers modelled such talk for learning too. Teachers also needed the confidence to focus the class on the quality of their talk, and to intervene to support groups during discussion.

Another teacher development programme – Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) (Fennema et al) linked how teachers designed and taught mathematics with their students’ thinking as they tackled mathematics problems. Teachers found out how their students were thinking by questioning them, reading what they had written and listening to their explanations. They then used what they learned to decide on the students’ next steps in learning: 'She [a teacher] kept extensive notes about each child’s thinking and used her notes to write problems to fit what she knew'.

The teachers made children's thinking central to how they taught: 'They came to believe that their role was not to tell children how to think, but to provide an environment in which children’s knowledge could develop as the children engaged in problem-solving experiences and reported on solution strategies.' In one example from the study, children were expected to solve problems such as 24 + 46 in any way they could and to understand how they solved the problem so they could tell their teacher and other pupils about it.

In both these programmes the students made gains in their learning when compared with control groups that did not take part in the programmes.

The key role of teachers’ professional development in designing effective curriculum experiences
Professional development was a crucial component in the design of many programmes. It was also linked to the effectiveness of a wide range of programmes aimed at developing particular pedagogic strategies that ran across subjects, such as thinking skills. CPD supported by external specialists – usually from HEIs – enabled teachers to understand and rehearse children’s thinking and strategies prior to the learning experiences themselves.

In the TRAC programme, the CPD took teachers through the professional learning they needed so that they could then guide their pupils through a series of lessons that built up their skills in using dialogue effectively for learning. The CGI programme involved mathematics specialists supporting teachers in exploring and refining their beliefs and attitudes in ways that enabled them to place their students’ thinking at the centre of the curriculum experiences they designed and facilitated. Teachers gained an understanding of their students' mathematical thinking and planned how to use it as the basis for the development of more advanced mathematical ideas.

You may like to read a case study that highlights the importance of teachers’ professional development in the context of in-house CPD for a mathematics department.

How was the research designed?

This summary draws together findings from 11 studies which were selected from a review of individual studies that had been highlighted in a number of systematic research reviews published by QCA in 2008 (see further reading).  These studies were selected because they offered classroom-based examples of the six key findings highlighted by the review. 
 
Nine of the 11 studies were evaluations; one of them was a randomised controlled trial (in which intervention strategies are randomly allocated to pupils). There were also two case studies. 
 
Seven of the studies used pre- and post tests or assessments and two employed post-tests. One used a mixture of surveys and school data, including students’ performance on state  tests.  One study used post intervention interviews and questionnaires. Seven studies involved the construction of intervention groups and control or comparison groups that were not subject to the interventions.

The research reviews which disclosed the individual studies followed the methodology used in systematic reviewing and included:

• identifying potential reviews, published from 2000 onwards
• developing search terms based upon definitions taken from international databases, thesauri and search engines
• filtering the results of the inclusive searches to create a map of existing research, and
• recording data from the studies in a custom-built database to enable read-across of patterns and trends in the data

The methodology also included searching the following relevant websites and databases:

• the EPPI-Centre Evidence Library;
• the Evidence Based Policy and Practice website;
• National Foundation for Educational Research website;
• the Campbell Collaboration website from the US;
• the What Works Clearinghouse from the US;
• the Education Works website from New Zealand; and
• ERIC, BEI, the UK Educational Evidence Portal, IngentaConnect, Education-Line, CERUK, and Regard (ESRC).

What are the implications?
Teachers may like to consider the following implications of the findings of this research:

• Real life contexts were found to be effective in promoting student motivation and achievement. How can you create contexts based in real life, such as transport, the local environment, local institutions, which cover all the necessary elements of the content?
• Dialogue helped students tackle open-ended activities that involved them in identifying what they knew and understood already so they could build on it effectively. How can you increase such opportunities? Could you, for example, turn more content into challenging open-ended activities that require pupils to think together in a structured way to solve a problem?
• Cross-curricular teaching and learning provided teachers with extra flexibility for developing the curriculum and opportunities to help pupils connect ideas together at a deeper level. How can you work with colleagues from other subject areas to identify opportunities where cross-curricular approaches could be effective, e.g. drama and science, mathematics and design, literacy and science, ICT and art?

School leaders might like to consider the following implications:

• Evidence in the summary suggests that deep subject knowledge combined with knowledge of effective teaching and learning strategies are essential for effective curriculum development. How do your school CPD strategies approach combining the development of knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning strategies and subject knowledge? How best might you use curriculum design as a form of professional learning for teachers?
• Curriculum linked to home and community helped students’ learning and motivation. Are there ways in which you could enhance this process through the services of e.g. governors, parents or other members of the local community who may be involved in early learning centres, volunteer or other community organisations?
• Can you create opportunities for teachers to plan work with parents that requires students and their parents to actively work together? Examples could include sharing literacy activities that involve parents, asking pupils to make predictions and answer questions about what they are reading?

Gaps in the research
Gaps that are uncovered in a piece of research have a useful role in making sure that future research builds cumulatively on what is known. But research also needs to inform practice, so practitioners’ interpretation of the gaps and follow-up questions are crucial. We think the following kinds of studies would usefully supplement the findings presented in this summary:

• more research into how to 'diagnose' or identify students’ existing conceptions and build on them
• more studies, particularly longitudinal ones, of the impact of family and community-based learning and its interrelation with school-based learning studies, and
• more English research into mathematics teaching and learning practices and how these are influenced by both the culture of English schooling and teachers’ beliefs.

What is your experience?
Do you have any evidence regarding strategies for developing the curriculum in ways that are particularly effective in meeting the needs of your pupils? Do you have action research or enquiry based school strategies/experiences or programmes that are designed to explore new ways of presenting the curriculum? We would be interested to hear about examples of effective approaches, which we could perhaps feature in our case study section.

The studies
We used the following 11 studies for this RfT summary:

Beyer, F. S., & Presseisen, B. Z. (1995) Facing History and Ourselves: Initial Evaluation of an Inner‐City Middle School Implementation. Philadelphia, PA: Research for Better Schools, Inc.

Black, D. R., & Goldowsky, A. (1999) Science theater as an interpretive technique in a science museum. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. Boston, MA: March 28–31.

Blank, L. (2000) A Metacognitive Learning Cycle: A Better Warranty for Student Understanding. Science Education, 84 (4), pp. 486-506.

Fantuzzo, J. W., Davis, G. Y., & Ginsburg, M. D. (1995) Effects of parent involvement in isolation or in combination with peer tutoring on student self‐concept and mathematics achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, pp. 272‐281.

Fennema, E., Carpenter, T., Franke, M., Levi, L., Jacobs, V., & Empson, S. (1996) A longitudinal study of learning to use children's thinking in mathematics instruction. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27, pp. 403‐434.

Garcia-Obregon, Z., Trevino, J., Uribe-Moreno, S., & Zuniga, S. (2000) The Effectiveness of a School Based Service-Learning Program ‘Community Connection’ at a South Texas Middle School. Texas: South Texas Research and Development Center

Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999) Children's talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25, pp. 95‐111.

Strang, J., & Shayer, M. (1993) Enhancing high school students' achievement in chemistry through a thinking skills approach. International Journal of Science Education, 15, pp.319‐337.

Tizard, J., Schofield, W.N., & Hewison, J. (1982). Collaboration between teachers and parents in assisting children’s reading. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 52, pp. 1‐15.

Wierstra, R. F. A. (1984) A study on classroom environment and on cognitive and affective outcomes of the PLON‐curriculum. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 10, pp. 273–282.

Williams, D., Yanchar, S., Jensen, L., & Lewis, C. (2003) Character education in a public high school: a multi-year enquiry into unified studies. Journal of Moral Education, 32, pp. 4-30.