Does Practical Work Really Work? A study of the effectiveness of practical work as a teaching and learning method in school science

25 practical science lessons, 8 English secondary schools

English secondary school science, ages 11-16; 'typical' practical lessons selected by teachers as representative of their normal practice.

Observational field study, NOT a controlled comparison — there is no control group and no achievement test, so this paper cannot and does not estimate an effect size. Effectiveness is scored on a two-level framework (Millar/Tiberghien): Level 1 = did students DO what the teacher intended with the objects; Level 2 = did students THINK what the teacher intended (use the target scientific ideas). Data are field notes plus audio-recorded teacher and student interviews; the researchers, not an independent scorer, coded the lessons against teacher-stated intentions collected before the lesson. Every observed task was 'recipe' style; open investigation was essentially absent, so this is a test of practical work AS PRACTISED, not of its steelman.

The single most-cited empirical indictment of school practical work, and the source of the 'effective at getting students to DO things, ineffective at getting them to THINK about things' formulation. Across 25 typical English secondary practical lessons, practical work was generally effective at Level 1 (students manipulated the apparatus as intended and produced the intended phenomenon) and much weaker at Level 2 (students rarely used the intended scientific ideas to guide their actions or interpret their data). Teachers' own lesson objectives were overwhelmingly about substantive content, not about enquiry procedure, and lesson plans contained no explicit strategy for bridging observation to concept — teachers treated producing the phenomenon as the end in itself. NOTE WHAT THIS IS NOT: no control group, no test, no effect size. It shows practical work is badly used; it does not show that well-used practical work fails.

No comparison groups and no achievement outcome, so selection/heredity is not the live threat; the live threat is that the outcome is the researchers' own judgement against teachers' own stated intentions.

Directly replicated and extended by Abrahams & Reiss 2012 (JRST), which applied the same framework to 30 lessons across primary and secondary schools and reached the same two-level split. The finding is qualitative and has been reproduced rather than effect-size-replicated.