Mobile learning and cognition
The rise of mobile learning in schools during the past decade has led to promises about its power to extend and enhance student cognitive development – for example, by providing greater...
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The BERA Blog was established in 2015 to provide research-informed content on key educational issues in an accessible manner.
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Arresting ‘epistemic violence’: Decolonising the national curriculum for history
A renewed call to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum has marked a shift in thinking about education and what should form the canon of curriculum content (le Grange, 2016). It has been amplified...
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Can biology A-levels be trusted to look after the future teaching of high quality ecological science?
‘The primary place in which to work at ecology is necessarily in the field’ Tansley (1952/1987) Most contemporary ecologists could not envisage a world without fieldwork....
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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...
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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...
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A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Young children and multimodal learning with tablets
It has become increasingly apparent that being literate is a fundamental skill for citizens of the 21st century, just as it was in previous times, but also that new conceptualisations of what it...
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Supporting early-childhood teachers with integrating a humanoid robot to enhance learning
Anthropomorphic robots are increasingly being used as a technology in early childhood settings, and they have been found to enhance social interaction (Tanaka, Cicourel & Movellan, 2007), support...
Continue reading blog postConfusion, contradiction and exclusion: The problems of British values and the national curriculum in history teaching
From 2010, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition began to reassess the teaching of history in schools across the key stages of the national curriculum in England and Wales. After...
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Action research in the classroom: Applying spacing and retrieval practice
I have been a classroom teacher for nearly two decades, but have only recently undertaken action research. In this post I describe my experiences with spacing (Bjork & Bjork, 2014; Cepeda et al,...
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