Evidence for Learning launches much anticipated Early Childhood Education Toolkit

Evidence for Learning, an organisation that helps educators increase learning by improving the evidence of what works and why, has launched their early childhood education toolkit which will help support educators to make the best decisions about which approaches will have the greatest learning impact for the children in their care. 

The freely available toolkit captures the evidence from global research on twelve key topics relevant to early childhood education in a clear and simple manner that is designed to provide educators with key facts around what the approach is, how effective it is in terms of impacting children’s learning, how robust the evidence base is and what the costs to implement would be. 

For example, for one of the topics, “communication and language approaches” an educator can review a summary that explains the approach, find out how effective “communications and language approaches” are at facilitating learning, understand the extent of evidence that supports the approach and how much it would cost to implement in the classroom. 

A useful summary is also provided that captures the captures key points namely for the “communication and language approaches” the summary reads; “high impact, very low cost, based on extensive evidence” and “overall, studies of communication and language approaches consistently show positive benefits.”

The other eleven topics included in the toolbox are:

• Digital technology
• Earlier starting age
• Early literacy approaches
• Early numeracy approaches
• Extra hours
• Parental engagement
• Physical development approaches
• Physical environment
• Play based learning
• Self regulation strategies
• Social and emotional learning strategies

The resource is freely available and also includes a comprehensive archive of Australian research for each topic which can be found here. 

Evidence for Learning, the creator of the toolkit, is a not for profit organisation that exists to support great practice across schools, classrooms and early learning centres across Australia by translating evidence garnered from research outcomes into accessible tools for educators to apply. 

The organisation is incubated by Social Ventures Australia (SVA) with the support of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the Education Endowment Foundation (UK) as founding partners.