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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)....

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 –...

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...

Open resources and accessibility

Open educational resources (OERs) are:   ‘[A]ny type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials...

Encouraging inclusion of at-risk students through co-op video games

Every day, teachers face challenges with including students who are inactive participants in the classroom. Such challenges may involve social difficulties – such as shyness, disruptive...

Did socially engaged students make more cognitive contribution?

According to a report prepared for the Higher Education Funding Council for England, online and distance courses have increased significantly in the UK over the past decade; a survey by the UK's...

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...

Feedback is good, but scaling it…

One of the aspects of being an instructor that I personally find most frustrating is how difficult is to improve a learning experience. The strong interdependency of so many factors makes finding...

The educational implications of Lionel Shriver’s attack on diversity ‘quotas’

‘[I]f an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published,...

A baseline without basis: The validity and utility of the proposed reception baseline assessment in England

This report sets out the case against the government’s proposal to use a baseline assessment test of pupils in reception to hold schools in England to account for the progress that those pupils...

Teacher education: A weapon of mass instruction?

Two drivers influence nation states engaging in systemic educational reform: a baffling array of metrics on the subject of learning, performance and effectiveness; and the policy impact of...