Blog feedResearch: Glow does improve attainment
17th August
After a week of research findings about how young people use the net here on Connected Live, Jaye Richards from Cathkin High School presents us with more questions (and a few answers, too) about the potential for improving attainment by using Scotland’s national intranet, Glow.
The improvement in attainment has been significant, and you don’t have to read between the lines to see the potential for a second development the architects of Glow maybe hadn’t considered: Glow helps those teachers with less experience help their learners excel particularly more.
This research study tracked four S3 classes working through the same modules as part of the standard grade Biology course. Results were tested using summative instruments of assessment comprising topic-specific questions from past standard grade Biology papers, and an end of year exam. One class, after two modules taught without it, studied one module using ICT timetabled for one of three lessons each week over one school term, with a mixture of independent and collaborative learning tasks reinforcing the learning objectives for that week, delivered using the GLOW virtual learning environment.
Results for this class with the same pupils and the same teacher showed a mean increase of 32.27% for the GLOW vs. non-GLOW modules. The attainment of this class on the non-GLOW modules was consistent and significantly below the best of the four classes. However, on the GLOW module, it was better by 14.69% than the mean of the other three classes. Further examination of the results showed that the weaker students benefited at least as much as their more able classmates.
John Connell, one of Glow’s fathers (or is it uncles?) and now working for Cisco, has lifted the main questions that remain for us to answer in a superb sumary of Jaye’s extensive research. Likewise, I’d encourage those both implementing or deciding how to imlpement Glow to read the paper and make their own suggestions as to how those questions could be answered, here on Connected Live or on John’s blog.
Categories: Glow, Research
Tags: glowscotland
Comments
Comment from John Connell
Time: August 17, 2008, 11:37 am
Funnily enough Ewan, the idea that the coherent set of tools contained in Glow might be especially helpful to less experienced teachers was an explicit objective of the project from the early days of our thinking and planning, although for various reasons it was an objective that we kept internal to the team. And not only less experienced teachers, but also a platform that would allow teachers working in authorities that were less well endowed technologically than others to have chance of levelling the playing field to some extent - this too, we kept to ourselves for reasons of tact - it was nonetheless an explicit part of the rationale for SSDN from the very beginning.
I’ll leave the decision on paternity to others 
Comment from Jaye Richards
Time: August 17, 2008, 7:36 pm
I’m glad you picked up on that point Ewan - The results certainly suggest that using GLOW can help less experienced teachers achieve similar or better attainment results than more experienced colleagues. Of course, this research confirms Dylan Wiliam’s thoughts on teacher experience and attainment if the results are examined and the four classes scores before GLOW are considered. GLOW does appear to have been important in almost adding experience to an inexperienced teacher…
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