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BERA Blog highlights from 2018

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal welcome to all our BERA Blog readers in the UK and around the world in this, our third end-of-year-highlights special edition. And what a year this has turned out to be. (I really will...

Teaching as design: New research from technology-rich learning environments

  ‘We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for...

Researchers drawing on teachers’ tools: Picturebooks with migrant learners

This blog post springs from a symposium I convened at BERA Conference 2018 entitled ‘Using creative methods to explore complex topics with young participants’. The symposium reflected my...

The neglect of practice

Many BERA members will be very familiar with terms such as evidence-informed practice, evidence-based practice and research-engaged teaching. The recent BERA close-to-practice research project is...

The challenge of researching dialogic interactions in digital classroom contexts

Language is the most ubiquitous and flexible of the meaning-making tools. As such, it is a teacher’s main pedagogic tool (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). ‘Classroom dialogue’ can be thought of as...

Am I actually teaching historical thinking and reasoning?

Many teachers find it difficult to operationalise ideas from the literature and envisage ‘what it looks like in the classroom’. Teaching historical thinking and reasoning (HTR) is a good...

BERA Statement on Close-to-Practice Research

BERA offers this statement to serve as a shared reference-point for high quality research, conducted within diverse research traditions, that shares the central aim of making a contribution to...

A new tool to help teachers as digital learning designers

We began with a sense of mission: to support teachers in making effective use of learning technologies. Educational research has done little so far to help teachers into the digital age; policy...

BERA Bites: A resource for teachers, lecturers and students from the BERA Blog

The BERA Blog editors are pleased to announce the launch of a new series of publications: BERA Bites, edited collections of selected articles on key topics in education published on the BERA Blog....

Do value-added measures of school and teacher performance reflect genetic differences between students?

Metrics of school and teacher performance are increasingly used by policymakers and in the UK education systems to determine, for example, performance-related pay and positions in school league...

BERA Bites, issue 2: Educational leadership: Are our schools fit for the future?

BERA Bites

The BERA Bites series presents selected articles from the BERA Blog on key topics in education, presented in an easily printable and digestible format to serve as teaching and learning resources...

DfE and NFER on baseline testing: Do they know what they do?

On 4 July 2018, the British Educational Research Association (BERA) expert panel on assessment published the report A baseline without basis (Goldstein et al 2018), in response to the Department...