Research Paper on Education Interventions: A Pathway to Enhancing Learner Skills

Introduction

Education interventions offer a wide variety of programs and developments that focus on improving education, particularly in developing countries and at an international level. Primarily, educational international provide learners with the support they require to acquire the necessary skills. In a global educational system, the interventions should aid in addressing functional skills, behavioural, cognitive, social, and academic developments that directly impact the student's ability to learn. The modern industrial societies are taking charge of the concepts and theories behind the sociology of education on the involvement of the public in the expansion, growth, development, and continuity of education more specifically in the international education academy. In practice, educational interventions should improve the individuals understanding of the key concepts for the evaluation of learning (Halsey, Lauder, Brown, & Stuart Wells, 1997). For instance, instructional interventions focus and are designed to assist the students as well as aid the international educational academies in tracking the student's progress. In other cases, different responses offer the basis for educational systems in the global structure whereby other factors could impact the roles of educational intervention in achieving the ultimate goals of learning as intended in the different theories of education (Halsey, Lauder, Brown, & Wells, 1997). This paper will provide a view on ways that theory could deliver differing facets on the education phenomena, evaluate the different ways through which theory of education provide a significant framework in education research. Also, the paper will critically reflect on the strategies that theory delivers underpinning to academic practices and educational policies.

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Existing Data

This paper is based on real data from an intervention program which seeks to improve the students reading and language skills. The data includes students from year seven through year nine enrolled in the British School system who are in key stage 3 and aged 11 to 13. The study group sat for a comprehensive examination which examined 46 reading skills and covered five domains. Students in need of intervention make the group in this study after performing dismally and failing to reach the critical stage 4. The intervention seeks to prepare the students for the GCE examination, which will be set at key stage 4. The intervention program aims to improve the reading and speaking skills for a whole year and also they are not allowed to choose a second language during the year like it is the case for the other students which seeks to ensure that they can focus on improving their English reading and speaking skills. Two significant assessments on the study group were carried out in March and June aimed at assessing the progress of their English language. Majority of the students who failed in their English reading and speaking skills are boys who make 95% of the students under the intervention. From a comparative analysis, there is a significant improvement in the majority of the students, which shows the efficacy of the current intervention.

Every Child Matters

Today, there is a significant focus on improving learning, which is instrumental in attaining holistic education achievement in line with "Every Child Matters" directive (Evans & Rich, 2011). The intervention to help the students with low reading and language skills perform better is an instrumental aspect that seeks to help every child to attain their potential (Williams, 2004). Different students have different capabilities and "Every Child Matters" seeks to ensure that schools create desired environment to cater for the special reading and language skills of the poor performing students (Evans & Rich, 2011). Boys and girls have different learning needs, and educational institutions have the responsibility of creating the desired learning environment to facilitate learning (Williams, 2004). School-based interventions should be based on proved education theories as well as the individual needs of the students by assessing their performance and weaknesses. This ensures that the schools initiate student-oriented interventions, which are evidence-based (Evans & Rich, 2011). The raw data shows that creating student-oriented interventions to help all the students attain their potential in reading and language skills can help improve the students' performance from the March and June assessments of the group which show significant improvement amongst the majority of the students.

Theoretical Considerations

Social Construvism Theory

The social construvism is an essential education theory that can be used to resolve educational performance problem like in our case where the students have been performing dismally in reading and language (Hurst, Wallace, & Nixon, 2013). The social construvism education theory holds that social interaction is instrumental in the development of knowledge. Using the social constructivism theory the teachers and school administration roles are transformed to education facilitators who help facilitate learning by creating the right environment. In a language and reading education program the teachers can be able to help learners by interacting with them which improves their understanding of the student's education needs (Hurst et al., 2013). Understanding the social processes within a learning environment is key in understanding the scope of learning and creating more effective instructional and reading strategies to help the students improve their reading and language competences.

Constructivism is a theory of acquiring and internalizing knowledge where learners construct new knowledge from their daily experiences through accommodation and assimilation processes (Hurst et al., 2013). By assimilation, individuals integrate new experiences that align with their representations into the existing model without changing it and accommodation entails resetting a person's mental representation of the world to the new experiences. According to constructivists, there is no knowledge existing except that which we construct ourselves; learning sorely entails the individual building of meanings rather than apprehending the existence of things or partly recalling ideas (Hein, 1991). By believing that knowledge encompasses discovering the outside world, we get to attain logical and rational understanding of the world.

Social constructivism has been applied in education to aid in imparting academic knowledge to learners whereby they're provided with technical activities that require their practical skills to learn and manipulate objects of the world (Hurst et al., 2013). Students are engaged in active research as they become managers of their own learning and teachers play the role of facilitators by helping them attain their own apprehension of the world. Interaction with others such as peers, teachers, and parents is essential in social knowledge construction such as language skills (Vygotsky, 1978). Educational constructivism approach has been productive in several fields such as psychological as learners attain cognitive skills like critical thinking and developed self-esteem (Gerstenmaier, 2001).

Discussion and Collaboration

Engaging students in discussions and collaboration has been found to be influential in the development of the reading and language skills solutions (Momtaz & Garner, 2010). Education theory holds that collaboration and discussion between students and their teachers can help to create problem specific strategies to address reading challenges facing the cohort under investigation. Using this theoretical approach teachers can use peer discussion groups to issue learning intervention to improve language and reading skills by requiring students to practice together and also engage in dramatic plays which improves acquisition of phonetic and letter knowledge (Momtaz & Garner, 2010). Besides, the discussion and collaboration approach encourages independence and autonomy amongst students which is key in facilitating the development of future language and reading problem solving skills.

This entails learning collaboratively that involves discussion of the subject and joint noetic efforts by both the learners, usually in groups and the teacher. This approach focuses on the exploration of the coursework by learners and discussion among themselves rather than teacher's presentment of the same (Smith & MacGregor, 1992). In addition to collaborative learning being an educational approach where a group of learners works together to get a solution to a problem or undertake a chore, it is also widely applied in the societal setting as there is growing need of working together on critical issues such as fighting cancer.

Collaborative mutual learning enables critical thinking among learners since they are in charge of their own learning process and it depicts better productiveness. Evidence shows that discussions and collaborative learning yields better thinking and longer holding of the information compared to solo learners (Marjan & Mozhgan, 2011). Collaborative learning is vital in the development of social knowledge from the group interactions as members are assigned different roles, such as recorder and summarizer that should be combined for the groups' success (Momtaz & Garner, 2010). It also equips the learners with skills of puzzling out problems, reading and language skills, better apprehending capabilities and choice-making since they are offered complicated problems to discuss, solve together and make deductions.

Active Learning

Another key education theory that can be incorporated in the current scenario to improve reading and language skills is the active learning which is a theoretical underpinning that encourage students to be creative and curious in nature which plays an instrumental role in encouraging them to participate in learning (Turkan, Bicknell, & Croft, 2012). The theory holds that doing all the work for the students eliminates the need for investigative research on the part of the student and it is detrimental towards knowledge acquisition. Active learning is a competency-based approach where students are actively engaged in their own learning through activities that will help build new knowledge and skills rather than passively heeding and following directions (Freeman et al, 2014). This approach lays more emphasis on building up learner's skills by according them technical activities that require more thinking rather than the direct transmission of data from the teacher (Brame, n.d). Active learning of ideas and skills basically occur in thought-stimulating activities in both direct learning where study-related chores are issued to the learner, discovery learning that involves carrying out of experiments and individual conclusions inferred from observations made and in other problem-solving kinds that cannot be classified as either direct or discovery. Activities given to learners in this approach are aimed at giving fill-ups between their held knowledge and the new data advancing their apprehension, for instance, teachers may issue assignments that challenge false beliefs held so as to provide better apprehension as a basis of their knowledge construction (Momtaz & Garner, 2010). Active participation involves free interaction thus aids in the advancement of reading, writing, and verbal language skills. According to an analysis by Freeman et al of active and traditional learning approaches chances of failure comparison, active learning registered a lower score of 20% as the traditional approach display higher chance...