The Evidence on Teaching

Explore the evidence

7 of 88 decisions · clear everything

Survives the gold standard Independent, durable, rigorous The debunked shelf Cheap wins For parents at home Famous numbers, deflated Where we admit ignorance The terrain

evidenceall drop D A–B A only

evaluatorany no dev-led independent

durabilityany follow-up ≥1yr ≥2yr

what are these? →

Your situation · from the applicability layer — absence means “not yet assessed,” never “doesn’t apply”

who's delivering

group / setting

cost

outcome class

Group within classes or across grades by subject: modest, nearly free wins. Whole-school streaming does nothing, and early between-school tracking harms the bottom.

moderate supportconf: highgc: low

12/1236/48connected:Do career and technical education

Ability grouping and tracking — four practices, four verdicts · grouping · ages 5–18 · structure

Accelerate ready kids: they keep pace with older classmates, bank a year, and show no social-emotional harm at 50. The gifted label itself does nothing; the content does.

moderate supportconf: highgc: medium

8/830/48connected:Algebra timing

Acceleration and gifted programs — the label vs the content · grouping · ages 5–18 · structure

Feedback on the task helps modestly; feedback on the person backfires — a stable third of studies reverse. The famous 0.4–0.7 number has no computed source.

mixedconf: highgc: low

18/1812/48connected:Retrieval practice (the testing ef Does teaching music produce musica Placement and mastery diagnosis

Feedback and formative assessment · feedback · ages 5–18 · method

Selective CTE high schools raise male graduation 8-10pp and early-career earnings 17-35% on lottery and cutoff designs; test scores, degrees, and every outcome for girls are flat.

moderate supportconf: mediumgc: low

19/1948/48connected:Ability grouping and tracking

Do career and technical education tracks help students — and which students? · practical · ages 14–18

Teaching coding teaches coding: the one clean school RCT gives g=0.47-0.68. Which approach you pick barely matters, and almost every effect size rests on an instrument the developers built.

moderate supportconf: mediumgc: low

22/2225/48connected:Does learning to code improve gene Talent and trainability

Does teaching programming actually teach programming — and does the method matter? · computer-science · ages 5–18

Life-skills courses reliably teach the content and rarely change the conduct; behaviour moves only where instruction sits close in time to the decision, and driver education is worse than nothing.

mixedconf: mediumgc: low

11/1148/48

Do life-skills courses — money, cooking, driving, health — change what students actually do? · practical · ages 6–18

Classroom order is causally worth a great deal — one disruptive peer costs classmates 3% of adult earnings — yet no branded behaviour programme reliably delivers it and exclusion makes things worse.

mixedconf: mediumgc: low

25/2536/48connected:Talent and trainability Can executive function be trained,Should a school buy a social and e Are self-control and grit teachabl

How should a school run its classrooms and its discipline system? · behavior · ages 4–18 · structure

The URL is the state — any view you build here is a permalink you can hand to someone mid-argument.