As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations, BERA has collected together a set of 50 landmark studies that have had a significant impact on educational policy, practice, research methodology and/or theory over the past 50 years.

In 2013, as BERA was approaching its 40th anniversary, we invited the membership to submit ideas of how this milestone could be commemorated. Inspired by the British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Dr Tony Breslin proposed selecting 40 landmark studies that have had a significant impact on educational policy, educational practice, research methodology and/or educational theory over the past 40 years.

As we approached the 50th anniversary, we decided to add 10 studies from the past decade using similar principles and approaches used to collate the original 40.

We are publishing this list of 50 studies and the accompanying narrative at the end of our 50th anniversary year. BERA’s vision is for ‘educational research to have a profound and positive influence on society across the four nations and internationally’. We hope that these studies (and, indeed, the many that did not make the final selection) demonstrate that vision in action.

Read and download our ′50@50′ publication below, which provides details of the 10 most recent studies and the policy context in which they were published.

Click on the tiles further below to read and download summaries of the 40 earlier studies and the policy context in which they were published.