Teacher Ollie's Takeaways is a weekly summary of many of the fascinating and inspiring things that Ollie's discovered in the world of education. Often in the form of a twitter digest, it can also sometimes include book or conference notes. Find all past Teacher Ollie's Takeaways here, 


The importance of measuring what matters in education, via @jaymctighe

And this was a follow up tweet…

Two excellent articles on Singapore's education system, via @HFletcherWood

Comprehensive list of research on homework, via @HuntingEnglish

Article (linking to paper) on the role of positive maths attitudes and achievement

After reading this article on willpower and task switching, I changed how I'd structured my morning!

What did I change? Instead of working on email for an hour, and reading for an hour. I did half an hour of each, and alternated till both were done ; )

List of factors regarding ‘What makes research evidence useful for teachers?', via @HuntingEnglish

Excerpts from Gene Glass' 1976 paper in which he INVENTS meta-analysis!

(The following was originally posted as a thread on twitter. Find that thread here)

I’ve read a bit recently critiquing the approach of the ‘meta-analysis’. So I’m trying to look into it. Stop one, Gene Glass’ 1976 paper ‘Primary, secondary, and meta-analysis of research’. Here’s what he’s saying. (pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e990/a41e8f09e…) Meta-analyses are necessitated by the sheer volume of research that’s out there now (‘now’ being 1976). And then-current methods weren’t up to scratch. (but note how he himself suggests that combining 500 studies will ‘defy simple summary’)

As an aside, a pretty funny characterisation of those then-current methods.

Then he makes some really interesting comments regarding his thoughts about studies with design and analysis flaws. I feel like further discussion is needed to work out exactly what he means by this

He moves on to then highlight the value/importance of summarising the research, and getting it out there.

Some interesting comments are made regarding how early meta-analyses were approached. Curious to know into what level of detail that recent meta-analyses go to in order to separate studies based upon design quality, significance of results, contextual factors, etc.

Now, here it starts to get interesting. By my reading, Glass suggests that it doesn’t make sense to compare studies that don’t have the same contexts, and, in order to compare A and B, settles on a meta-analytic approach that ONLY includes A,B,C studies (‘c’ being control).

Then he makes a funny comment.

Wraps up with a great word I've never heard before

Short but very interesting paper. Provides an interesting historical context for the birth of the meta-analysis.

Related