Weaving the literature on integration, pedagogy and assessment: insights for curriculum and classrooms. Report 2.
Burke, PatrickORCID: 0000-0002-8490-401X and Lehane, PaulaORCID: 0000-0003-0856-3505
(2023)
Weaving the literature on integration, pedagogy and assessment: insights for curriculum and classrooms. Report 2.
Technical Report.
National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, Dublin.
Readers should bear the following in mind:
● This is the second of two reports commissioned by the National Council for
Curriculum and Assessment to inform the ongoing development of the Primary
Curriculum Framework. Report 1 addresses conceptualisations of curriculum
integration. This second report addresses the literature on pedagogy and
assessment. Annex 2 contains the relevant methodological information for this
report.
● A timeline for the development of this report can be seen on p. 2 of Report 1.
● This report is one of several commissioned by NCCA in 2022. We encourage
readers to consult the reports on specific curriculum areas available on the NCCA
website (e.g. Nohilly et al., 2023). We do not attempt to detail pedagogical or
assessment advice for specific disciplines/subjects in this report.
● This report draws extensively on meta-analytic reviews. The box below provides
guidance for readers on interpreting the effect sizes reported in such reviews.
Understanding Effect Sizes
To establish the efficacy of a particular practice, it is common to use experimental
research designs. This usually involves one randomised group of children being taught
using the practice of interest (e.g. Group 1= a new teaching strategy) and a comparison
group (Group 2= traditional teaching strategy). The performance of each group is
measured and an average score is calculated. The scores of each group of students are
then statistically compared to see if there is meaningful difference. The effect size (ES)
indicates the scale of this difference (if it exists). Effect size can be calculated in many
ways, e.g. Cohen’s d, Hedge’s g. They can also be aggregated for the purpose of meta-analytic reviews. In educational research, an effect size of less than 0.05 is considered
small, 0.05 to less than 0.20 is medium, and 0.20 or greater is large (Kraft, 2020). Different
benchmarks exist, but in general, the larger the effect size the greater the impact on
student learning. In this report, we use the original author’s descriptors, e.g. if an author
classified the effect of their intervention as ‘medium’, we report as such.