A new article in the American Educational Research Journal describes a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to examine the efficacy of the Responsive Classroom (RC) approach on pupil achievement. The authors found that pupils taught using RC did not outperform those at schools assigned to the control condition in maths or reading.
RC is a widely used professional development intervention comprising practical teaching strategies designed to support children’s social, academic, and self-regulatory skills. More than 120,000 teachers have been trained in the approach. This trial involved 2,904 children from 24 US schools. They were randomised into intervention and control conditions, and studied from the end of second grade (Year 3) to fifth grade (Year 6).
Results showed that random assignment to RC did not have an impact on achievement outcomes. The authors say that other RCT results linking social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions to SEL outcomes are similarly lacklustre, and that there are several plausible explanations including the trial involving too few schools to detect a small effect. They also note that some outcomes (eg, motivation and engagement) may not adequately translate into outcomes measured by state standardised achievement tests, and that adopting interventions such as the RC approach involves a long process of teacher change ranging from three to five years. Data for this study was gathered during teachers’ first and second years of RC implementation, early in the process of adoption.
Source: Efficacy of the Responsive Classroom Approach: Results From a 3-Year, Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Trial (2014), American Educational Research Journal, 51(3).