Reading, writing, and thinking skills that transfer across subjects — strategy instruction that builds comprehension, scaffolds that make complex texts and disciplinary writing accessible, and protocols that teach students to evaluate sources, deconstruct media, and design tasks worth thinking hard about. All interventions cross-referenced to peer-reviewed meta-analyses where one exists.
Avg. effect (d): 0.47 across all 6 cardsStrongest: Source Credibility Evaluation Protocol (d=0.76, Huang et al. 2024)Last reviewed: May 2026
How to read these numbers
"Months of progress" is a teacher-friendly shorthand from the EEF Toolkit. It is not directly comparable across studies — different meta-analyses use different baselines, age groups, and outcome measures. Treat it as a magnitude indicator, not a precise prediction.
Cohen's d is the standardised effect size used in the original meta-analyses. d ≈ 0.40 is Hattie's "hinge point" — the average effect of a year of schooling. Higher = larger relative effect, but context matters more than the number.
Effect sizes are averages. A skill that shows large average effects can still produce small or negative effects in a specific classroom. Use these as a starting point for professional judgment, not a substitute for it.
Sources are dated. Where multiple meta-analyses exist, we lead with the most recent quality study and cross-reference EEF where available.
Implementation cost (Low / Medium / High) is a practical signal — not an exact science — of what your school needs to invest in teacher time, training, and structural changes to actually run the intervention well. It is the editorial team's reading of what the intervention typically requires in practice. Use it to gauge whether something is straightforward to introduce or a larger undertaking — not as a budget figure.
Some interventions are also priced in £ (UK) by the EEF Toolkit. For monetary cost data, see the EEF Teaching & Learning Toolkit.
Colour bands signal calibration, not value. An intervention in the "below typical" band is not "bad" — it means the intervention's average effect is below the typical effect of a year of schooling. That can still be appropriate for specific contexts the average does not capture.
Literacy & Critical Thinking
Reading Comprehension Strategy Selector
Pick the right reading comprehension strategy for the text and the class — reciprocal teaching, summarisation, prediction, questioning, text structure mapping, monitoring — and combine them so students have a small, well-rehearsed toolkit instead of a long list of one-off tricks.
d = 0.43Okkinga et al., Educational Psychology Review2018
LowImplementation
Literacy & Critical Thinking
Text Complexity Analyser & Scaffold Designer
Analyse what makes a text hard for your students — vocabulary, sentence structure, background knowledge, text structure — and design targeted scaffolds (pre-teaching, graphic organisers, signal-word work, chunking) so students can climb a challenging text instead of being filtered out by it.
d = 0.37Bogaerds-Hazenberg et al., Reading Research Quarterly2021
MediumImplementation
Literacy & Critical Thinking
Disciplinary Writing Scaffold
Design discipline-specific writing scaffolds — Toulmin for argument, CER (claim-evidence-reasoning) for science, IMRAD for lab reports, narrative arc for English — so students learn the genre conventions of each subject, not just generic 'good writing' that lands nowhere.
no EEF strand
d = 0.59Graham, Tate & Yang, Journal of Educational Psychology2023
MediumImplementation
Literacy & Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking Task Designer
Design tasks that make students actually do the cognitive work — analyse competing claims, evaluate evidence, weigh tradeoffs, justify a position — instead of recall dressed up as 'higher-order thinking'. Domain-specific framing built in: critical thinking transfers when it is taught inside the discipline, not as a generic skill.
no EEF strand
d = 0.30Abrami et al., Review of Educational Research2015
MediumImplementation
Literacy & Critical Thinking
Source Credibility Evaluation Protocol
Teach students lateral reading and the SIFT moves — Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims back to the original — so they can evaluate online sources the way fact-checkers actually do, not by reading down the page looking for an 'about us' link.
no EEF strand
d = 0.76Huang, Jia & Yu, Communication Research2024
MediumImplementation
Literacy & Critical Thinking
Media Literacy Deconstruction Protocol
Teach students to deconstruct media texts — adverts, news framing, social posts, film — using the classical media literacy questions: who made this, for whom, what's included, what's omitted, what techniques are used to persuade, and whose interests does it serve.
no EEF strand
d = 0.37Jeong, Cho & Hwang, Journal of Communication2012
MediumImplementation
Interrogate any educational claim
Heard a claim somewhere else? Type it here — we'll build a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or any chatbot. The prompt asks the model to cite real meta-analyses, separate strong from weak evidence, name boundary conditions, flag exaggerations, and discuss cost-effectiveness.
💡 For best results, enable your chatbot's reasoning / thinking mode before pasting — Claude's "Extended thinking", ChatGPT's "Think" mode, or Gemini's "Thinking" / 2.5 Pro reasoning. The prompt is more demanding than a typical Q&A and benefits from slower deliberation.