Materials Matter

FOCUS

Materials matter

Instructional materials + professional learning = student achievement

By David Steiner

Vol. 39 No. 6

A number of research summaries over the last few years have brought attention to the impact that high-quality instructional materials have on student learning. The U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse, which produces summaries of rigorous research, has identified a number of effective curricula with large effect sizes on students’ reading, math, and science learning (e.g. Borman, Dowling, & Schneck, 2008; Hirschhorn, 1993; Smith et al., 1993; Zucker, Tinker, Staudt, Mansfield, & Metcalf, 2008). In fact, studies show that selecting a high-quality curriculum can have a bigger impact than a number of other popular interventions such as decreasing class size and offering merit pay to teachers (Boser, Chingos, & Straus, 2015; Koedel & Polikoff, 2017; Whitehurst, 2009). One study found a spread between the

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Authors

David Steiner

David Steiner (d.steiner@jhu.edu) is executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

References

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