4 proven methods to significantly raise attainment
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- assessment for learning tells the teacher how well learners have learned something and so teachers can then act, if need be, to improve that learning or teach something harder on the firm learning foundations the teacher has established that the learner has.
- feedback is a process that enhances learning by providing learners with the opportunity to improve their current or recent attainment, by comparing with an ideal.
- mastery learning requires teachers to hold back from teaching harder knowledge/skills/methods until the learner has mastered the prerequisite knowledge/skills/methods.
- retrieval practice or spaced learning requires that practice questions are spaced out over time - rather than done in a block just after teaching - so that the learning can be recalled for longer.
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Although scaffolding is known to be effective at helping learners learn, it has such wide meaning, and requires adaptability and skill by the teacher - so rather than researchers proving scaffolding "works" they spend their time and skill looking at how to do it best. One often overlooked aspect to scaffolding is that fading of scaffolding needs to be done gradually, which is in opposition to a "teach topic once per year" scheme of learning, but fits well with timely practice's recommended spiral of gently rising expectations. We like to think of our layers as being scaffolding over time; as learners master a layer, the learner has built a chunk which becomes the learners' internal scaffolding, and so the teacher doesn't need to provide external scaffolding to teach the next layer. Sometimes however, we provide 2 layers: one with the scaffolding and one with very similar question types without scaffolding. In the future we hope to have the app automate the process of moving from the layer with to the layer without scaffolding.