The 10 most-cited articles in Review of Educational Research, 2017

The testing effect is a well-known concept referring to gains in learning and retention that can occur when students take a practice test on studied material before taking a final test on the same material. Research demonstrates that students who take practice tests often outperform students in nontesting learning conditions such as restudying, practice, filler activities, or no presentation of the material. However, evidence-based meta-analysis is needed to develop a comprehensive understanding of the conditions under which practice tests enhance or inhibit learning. This meta-analysis fills this gap by examining the effects of practice tests versus nontesting learning conditions. Results reveal that practice tests are more beneficial for learning than restudying and all other comparison conditions. Mean effect sizes were moderated by the features of practice tests, participant and study characteristics, outcome constructs, and methodological features of the studies. Findings may guide the use of practice tests to advance student learning, and inform students, teachers,…

Researchers recognize adaptive teaching as a component of effective instruction. Educators adjust their teaching according to the social, linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs of their students. While there is consensus that effective teachers are adaptive, there is no consensus on the language to describe this phenomenon. Diverse terminology surrounding the same phenomenon impedes effective communication and comprehensive understanding of this important aspect of classroom instruction. Moreover, researchers have studied this phenomenon using a variety of methods, in various disciplines, with different results. Therefore, our research team completed a comprehensive literature review of the empirical research studying adaptability across academic disciplines. In this article, we describe how adaptive teaching is defined and conceptualized in the education research literature from 1975 to 2014, the methods used to study instructional adaptations, and the results of these studies.

Computational thinking (CT) uses concepts that are essential to computing and information science to solve problems, design and evaluate complex systems, and understand human reasoning and behavior. This way of thinking has important implications in computer sciences as well as in almost every other field. Therefore, we contend that CT should be taught in elementary schools and included in every university’s educational curriculum. Several studies that measure the impact of teaching programming, analytical thinking, and CT have been conducted. In this review, we analyze and discuss findings from these studies and highlight the importance of learning programming with a focus on the development of CT skills at a young age. We also describe the tools that are available to improve the teaching of CT and provide a state-of-the-art overview of how programming is being taught at schools and universities in Colombia and around the world.

Ensuring an informed and effective dementia workforce is of international concern; however, there remains limited understanding of how this can be achieved. This review aimed to identify features of effective dementia educational programs. Critical interpretive synthesis underpinned by Kirkpatrick's return on investment model was applied. One hundred and fifty-two papers of variable quality were included. Common features of more efficacious educational programs included the need for educational programs to be relevant to participants' role and experience, involve active face-to-face participation, underpin practice-based learning with theory, be delivered by an experienced facilitator, have a total duration of at least 8 hours with individual sessions of 90 minutes or more, support application of learning in practice, and provide a structured tool or guideline to guide care practice. Further robust research is required to develop the evidence base; however, the findings of this review have relevance for all working in workforce education.

This systematic literature review was undertaken primarily to examine the role that print and digitally mediums play in text comprehension. Overall, results suggest that medium plays an influential role under certain text or task conditions or for certain readers. Additional goals were to identify how researchers defined and measured comprehension, and the various trends that have emerged over the past 25 years, since Dillon’s review. Analysis showed that relatively few researchers defined either reading or digital reading, and that the majority of studies relied on researcher-developed measures. Three types of trends were identified in this body of work: incremental (significant increase; e.g., number of studies conducted, variety of digital devices used), stationary (relative stability; e.g., research setting, chose of participants), and iterative (wide fluctuation; e.g., text length, text manipulations). The review concludes by considering the significance of these findings for future empirical research on reading in print or digital mediums.

Socioeconomic status is a major predictor of educational achievement. This systematic review and meta-analysis seeks to identify effective academic interventions for elementary and middle school students with low socioeconomic status. Included studies have used a treatment-control group design, were performed in OECD and EU countries, and measured achievement by standardized tests in mathematics or reading. The analysis included 101 studies performed during 2000 to 2014, 76% of which were randomized controlled trials. The effect sizes (ES) of many interventions indicate that it is possible to substantially improve educational achievement for the target group. Intervention components such as tutoring (ES = 0.36), feedback and progress monitoring (ES = 0.32), and cooperative learning (ES = 0.22) have average ES that are educationally important, statistically significant, and robust. There is also substantial variation in effect sizes, within and between components, which cannot be fully explained by observable study characteristics.

In this article, I identify educational interventions with an impact on student learning in Sub-Saharan Africa. After a systematic literature search, I conducted a meta-analysis synthesizing 56 articles containing 66 separate experiments and quasi-experiments and 83 treatment arms. I evaluated 12 types of education interventions such as the provision of school supplies, the use of teacher incentives, and school-based management programs. I examine each intervention type, present analytics on relative effectiveness, and explore why certain interventions seem to be more effective. A key finding is that programs that alter teacher pedagogy or classroom instructional techniques had an effect size approximately 0.30 standard deviations greater than all other types of programs combined. Limited evidence further suggests that pedagogical programs that employed adaptive instruction or teacher coaching were particularly effective. Given that the literature in the field is still nascent overall, these results advocate for further research into these pedagogical interventions.

This meta-analysis examined if students’ writing performance is improved by reading interventions in studies (k = 54 experiments; 5,018 students) where students were taught how to read and studies (k = 36 investigations; 3,060 students) where students’ interaction with words or text was increased through reading or observing others read. Studies included in this review involved true- or quasi-experiments (with pretests) written in English that tested the impact of a reading intervention on the writing performance of students in preschool to Grade 12. Studies were not included if the control condition was a writing intervention, treatment students received writing instruction as part of the reading intervention (unless control students received equivalent writing instruction), control students received a reading intervention (unless treatment students received more reading instruction than controls), study attrition exceeded 20%, less than 10 students were included in any experimental condition, and students attended a special school for students with disabilities. As predicted,…

This article examines evolving uses of Bourdieu’s signature concept of Cultural Capital in American educational research. Bourdieu originally developed the concept in the 1960s and 1970s by mixing French intellectual traditions with ideas from American social science. American researchers have adopted the term over three generations. The first generation understood the concept during the 1970s and early 1980s within broader traditions of mobility research, educational stratification, and conflict theory. Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, a second generation produced three variants of the concept. Over the past decade, a third generation has elaborated those variants into three distinct streams. A first stream, the “DiMaggio tradition,” uses survey methods to conceive cultural capital as resources that shape student outcomes. A second stream, the “Lareau tradition,” uses qualitative observations to interpret cultural capital as family strategies that align with schools’ institutional rewards. A third stream, the “Collins tradition,” offers the most micro-oriented conception of…

Executive functions (EFs), important cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, develop due to maturation and environmental stimulation. The current study systematically reviews and synthesizes evidence on the association between teacher–student interactions and EFs. The search resulted in 28 studies, from which 23 studies provided sufficient data to be included in the calculations. Overall effect sizes indicate that teacher–child interactions are related to general executive functioning, working memory, and inhibition but not cognitive flexibility. Relationships were stronger for studies including children at the beginning of elementary school, studies with higher socioeconomic status participants and more boys, and studies measuring teacher–child interactions at the dyadic level. This study shows that qualitative teacher–child interactions are important for performance in EFs in children. This suggests that teachers can promote the cognitive processes that are essential in children’s learning by changing their behavior to create an emotionally positive, structured,…