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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 1: Early childhood

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...

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...

Grammar and creativity in the English national curriculum

In November 2017 the Times Educational Supplement (TES) published an article under the headline ‘Teaching grammar does not improve children's writing ability, research finds’ (Bloom 2017)....

Investigating classroom contexts for learning for pupils with special educational needs: Class size, groupings and interactions

Many countries follow policies of inclusion in which pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are, as far as possible, educated in mainstream settings. For the most part this...

A response to Komatsu and Rappleye: What if east Asia’s high achievement is not the result of long hours of study, cram schools, and exam pressure?

In their recent BERA Blog article (10 August), Komatsu and Rappleye raise the idea that the high achievement of Asian education systems – and specifically Japan’s educational achievements –...

Elite universities, fields of study and top salaries: Which degree will make you rich?

As more people gain university degrees, people are increasingly aware that some degrees may be worth more than others. We know that the British socioeconomic elite is dominated by people who have...

What if east Asia’s high achievement is not the result of longer hours of study, cram schools, and exam pressure?

Since the inception of international comparative tests in the 1960s, Japanese students, like most students around east Asia, have consistently outscored their Anglo-American peers (that is, the...

Robots in the classroom? Preparing for the automation of teaching

Artificial intelligence in educational research and practice

Fifty years after Stanley Kubrick introduced cinemagoers to HAL9000, the prospect of a robot-infused world still feels more science fiction than social fact. Yet robots are steadily beginning to...

Closing the gap in access to free ‘universal’ early education: What affects participation among low-income families?

For over a decade, all children in England have been entitled to free government-funded early education and care from the term after they turn three. One of the aims of this policy is to close the...

Further reasons why educational research needs working papers

In a recent, very well-written blog, Professor Alice Sullivan argues that it is high time for UK education journals to abandon the practice of viewing the fact that a paper has been circulated as...