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Looking back on an event-full 2018

A year that championed educational research and its impact is now gone into the ether. We worked with our brilliant SIG convenors, partners and speakers to ply you with useful and enjoyable events...

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...

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...

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment-aware schools to redefine the landscape

The starting point for our article (Parker & Levinson, 2018) was the apparent contradiction in current government policy between an essentially top-down, ‘zero tolerance’ behaviourist model of...

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,...

How can cognitive load theory be applied to the teaching of history?

As a follower of a variety of educational blogs and their Twitter accounts, I became aware of a large number of people talking about the development of cognitive load theory and the impact it...

Aretaic pedagogy: How we can transform the aesthetics of good teaching?

Aretaic pedagogy is suggested as a refreshing paradigm of good teaching, putting at its centre, instead of a knowledge-based perspective, a virtue-based approach to education. Its origins are in...

Using technology for teaching independent-living skills to children with cognitive disabilities

Independent-living skills training is a core service offered by almost every rehabilitation centre for children with cognitive disabilities. The ulti-mate goal is to help children reach a high...

The battle against being educated

I have been publicly exploring the issue of disruption, violence and students’ challenging behaviour in post-school classrooms since 2000 (Lebor, 2000). Susan Wallace has also carried out...

Phonics ‘first and fast’… but at what cost?

Reading is one of life’s profound joys. According to reading expert Maryanne Wolf, reading changes the very structure of our brain and neural pathways; the act allows us to go beyond our own...

A new approach to observing different learners’ interactive behavior and learning performance in cMOOCs

With the development of web 2.0 technology and social media, learners can share, collect, and edit content with peers or friends to create knowledge. In these social spaces, learning approaches...

Longitudinal qualitative research to look at what works for children with conduct disorders

I was interviewing a teacher in a school for excluded pupils who had been providing one-to-one teaching to a child in a longitudinal study I was conducting. We were talking about the very...