Explicit vs Metacognitive writing instruction: Scoping phase of a teacher choices trial

Client:             Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)

Duration:        2025 - 2026

Geography:     England

Solutions:        Evaluation, Research

Writing is an essential life skill and facilitator of personal and academic success, helping pupils to organise and express their thoughts, deepen their understanding across all subjects and succeed academically. Sentence construction and combining is a key part of writing and emphasised in the Department for Education’s (DfE) Writing Framework. They are foundational to effective writing and enable children to move beyond isolated words and basic ideas to express thoughts clearly and logically. 

Evidence suggests that many children have not secured foundational sentence construction and combining skills by the end of Key Stage 1 or even Year 3. Reteaching of these skills is therefore an important need for schools and a common theme that teachers are likely to revisit in their classroom.  

Despite the consensus on the importance of sentence construction and combining skills, there is limited evidence on whether direct (explicit) or metacognitive approaches to instruction have greater impact on this foundational outcome.  

Oxford MeasurEd is conducting the scoping phase of a Teacher Choices (TC) trial. Teacher choices’ (TC) trials are aimed at testing everyday practices that teachers implement to support classroom learning and focus on approaches that teachers can implement with no specific additional training. Approaches that generate positive findings could be packaged into programmes or guidance in the future.  

If the scoping phase is successful, the trial will compare explicit instruction and metacognitive instruction) within Year 4 writing by exploring how – and how effectively – each pedagogy supports pupils in reacquiring and deepening their understanding of sentence construction, specifically through sentence combining.  

The purpose of this scoping phase is to address existing uncertainties before moving on to the evaluation stage. The assumptions to be tested during the scoping phase are that: 

• the choices represent a real everyday choice facing Year 4 teachers  

• the choices can be implemented easily and distinctly 

• there is a viable outcome measure appropriate for answering the research questions  

• it is feasible to conduct an impact evaluation using random allocation 

• the risk of unintended negative consequences is low  

Key Activities:

• Desk-review of evidence underpinning Theory of Change (ToC) 

• ToC workshop 

• Desk-review of potential outcome measures 

• Development of teacher implementation guides 

• User testing of implementation guides with teachers