The analysis of core components and causal principles in education programs: The case of teaching at the right level

• In Event: Core components of effective implementation: Unpacking successful educational interventions

Proposal

Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) is one of few interventions in international education recommended by the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP, 2023). The GEEAP review provides highly credible evidence in support of TaRL’s effectiveness. However, the credibility extends only to recommending the replication of a “proven” model (known as “fidelity of form”; Davey et al., 2018), whereas implementers looking to adopt the model need to understand the core components (the essential activities of the intervention) and causal principles (how and why the activities improve learning) of an intervention in order to adapt it to new contexts and replicate its impact (“fidelity of function”; Author, 2018). Currently, there is no systematic methodology available for identifying core components and causal principles in education interventions. In this work, we aimed to develop such a methodology based on a growing field which builds ‘theories’ of how education interventions work (Cartwright, 2019; CEDIL, 2020), and on the use of causal chain analysis in research synthesis (Kneale et al., 2018). We developed this methodology partly through its application to TaRL.
The process of developing the causal model involved several documented iterations of the causal model, with each iteration informed by interviews with designers and implementers of TaRL programmes and by published literature of two types: (i) evaluations of TaRL programs in a variety of contexts and (ii) literature, for example in educational psychology, that helped understand the mechanisms at play in the effect of the core components on learning outcomes.
The final causal model describes TaRL at several levels – classroom activities, support for teachers and operation at scale. Example core components at the classroom level include:
• Assessment to determine current learning levels
• Grouping students and aligning instruction to current learning levels.
These two core components operate through the following causal principle:
• Children learn faster when supported responsively in their zone of proximal development (i.e. targeting skills students do not yet have but which are next in their learning progression.)
In the presentation, we will describe the causal model at all three levels in greater detail.
The next stage in the project is to develop usable guidelines for implementers. The guidelines build on the causal model to support implementers in several ways.
• They offer greater flexibility to implementers. For example, implementers may experiment with different approaches to assessment with the understanding that the aim is to determine students current learning levels and group them accordingly.
• They help identify key aspects of the intervention to focus on. For example, the causal principle makes it clear that children should be learning in their zone of proximal development. Youth Impact, working in Botswana, have developed a tool to monitor and test this assumption.
In short, causal models with their core components and causal principles, help us to design programs not simply by replicating successful interventions, but based on a deep understanding of how they work and why they are successful.

Authors

• Matthew Jukes, RTI International

• Jonathan Stern, RTI International

• Michelle Kaffenberger, What Works Hub for Global Education, University of Oxford

• Yue-Yi Hwa, What Works Hub for Global Education, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

• Noam Angrist, Youth Impact; What Works Hub for Global Education, University of Oxford