The Gender Pay Gap in the British cohort studies, past, present and future

Heather Joshi’s presentation to the UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology, 7th June 2021

Changing Mindsets: Effectiveness trial

The Changing Mindsets project aimed to improve attainment outcomes at the end of primary school by teaching Year 6 pupils that their brain potential was not a fixed entity but could grow and change through effort exerted. The programme, delivered by Portsmouth University, taught pupils about the malleability of intelligence through workshops. Teachers attended short professional development courses on approaches to developing a ‘growth mindset’ before delivering sessions to pupils weekly, over eight consecutive weeks. Teachers were encouraged to embed aspects of the growth mindset approach throughout their teaching—for example, when giving feedback outside of the sessions. They were also given access to digital classroom resources, such as a video case study of Darwin overcoming adversity in his own life, as a practical example of the importance of having a growth mindset. The project was a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and included 101 schools and 5018 pupils across England, assigned to either intervention or control groups. The trial ran from September 2016 to February 2017. The process evaluation involved interviews with teachers, focus groups with pupils receiving the intervention, lesson observations, and surveys of both treatment schools and control groups throughout the course of the intervention. Key conclusions 1. Pupils in schools that received the intervention did not make any additional progress in literacy nor numeracy—as measured by the national Key Stage 2 tests in reading, grammar, punctuation, and spelling (GPS), and maths—compared to pupils in the control group. This finding has high security. 2. This evaluation also examined four measures of non-cognitive skills: intrinsic value, self-efficacy, test anxiety, and selfregulation. The evaluation did not find evidence of an impact on these measures for pupils in schools that received Changing Mindsets. A positive impact was found for the intrinsic value measure, but the impact was small and was not statistically significant. 3. Among pupils eligible for free school meals (‘FSM pupils’), those in schools that received the intervention did not make any additional progress in literacy nor numeracy—as measured by the national Key Stage 2 tests in reading, GPS, and maths— compared to FSM pupils in schools that did not receive the intervention. 4. One explanation for the absence of a measurable impact on pupil attainment is the widespread use of the growth mindset theory. Most teachers in the comparison schools (that did not receive the intervention) were familiar with this, and over a third reported that they had attended training days based on the growth mindset approach

The Effect of Embedding Formative Assessment on Pupil Attainment

Evidence suggests that adapting teaching responsively to pupil assessment can be effective in improving students’ learning. However, existing studies tend to be small-scale, leaving unanswered the question of how such formative assessment can operate when embedded as standard practice. In this study, we present the results of a randomized trial conducted in 140 English secondary schools. The intervention uses light-touch training and support, with most of the work done by teacher-led teaching and learning communities within schools. It is, therefore, well-suited to widespread adoption. In our pre-registered primary analysis, we estimate an effect size of 0.09 on general academic attainment in national, externally assessed examinations. Sensitivity analysis, excluding schools participating in a similar program at baseline, and complier analysis both suggest a larger effect size of 0.11. These results are encouraging for this approach to improving the implementation of formative assessment and, hence, academic attainment. Our findings also suggest that the intervention may help to narrow the gap between high and low prior attainment pupils, although not the gap between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and the rest of the cohort

Using time-use diaries to track changing behavior across successive stages of COVID-19 social restrictions

How did people change their behavior over the different phases of the UK COVID-19 restrictions, and how did these changes affect their risk of being exposed to infection? Time-use diary surveys are unique in providing a complete chronicle of daily behavior: 24-h continuous records of the populations’ activities, their social context, and their location. We present results from four such surveys, collected in real time from representative UK samples, both before and at three points over the course of the current pandemic. Comparing across the four waves, we find evidence of substantial changes in the UK population’s behavior relating to activities, locations, and social context. We assign different levels of risk to combinations of activities, locations, and copresence to compare risk-related behavior across successive “lockdowns.” We find evidence that during the second lockdown (November 2020), there was an increase in high-risk behaviors relative to the first (starting March 2020). This increase is shown to be associated with more paid work time in the workplace. At a time when capacity is still limited both in respect of immunization and track–trace technology, governments must continue to rely on changes in people’s daily behaviors to contain the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses. Time-use diary information of this type, collected in real time across the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, can provide policy makers with information to assess and quantify changes in daily behaviors and the impact they are likely to have on overall behavioral-associated risks

A New Perspective from Time Use Research on the Effects of Lockdown on COVID-19 Behavioral Infection Risk

We present findings from the first two waves of an innovative, population-representative, UK time-use diary survey conducted both pre- and mid-lockdown, using an online diary instrument that proved both reliable and quick-to-field. Combining diary information on activity, location, and co-presence to estimate infection risks associated with daily behavior, we show clear changes in such behavior related to infection risk between the pre- and mid-lockdown periods: a substantial reduction of time spent in those behaviors with the highest levels of risk, accompanied by an equivalent increase in low-risk behavior. Because, in general, a populations' time use changes relatively slowly, the behavioral changes revealed may be interpreted directly as a consequence of the UK COVID-19 'lockdown' regulations. Subsequent waves will reveal the behavioral consequences of future changes in regulation

The effect of embedding formative assessment on pupil attainment

Evidence suggests that adapting teaching responsively to pupil assessment can be effective in improving students’ learning. However, existing studies tend to be small-scale, leaving unanswered the question of how such formative assessment can operate when embedded as standard practice. In this study, we present the results of a randomized trial conducted in 140 English secondary schools. The intervention uses light-touch training and support, with most of the work done by teacher-led teaching and learning communities within schools. It is, therefore, well-suited to widespread adoption. In our pre-registered primary analysis, we estimate an effect size of 0.09 on general academic attainment in national, externally assessed examinations. Sensitivity analysis, excluding schools participating in a similar program at baseline, and complier analysis both suggest a larger effect size of 0.11. These results are encouraging for this approach to improving the implementation of formative assessment and, hence, academic attainment. Our findings also suggest that the intervention may help to narrow the gap between high and low prior attainment pupils, although not the gap between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and the rest of the cohort