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What makes students curious about science?

BERA Conference 2023

‘It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry’, Einstein is reported to have said. Given...

Concepts for climate change within secondary science

It is widely understood that climate change is among the greatest challenges facing humanity, and that knowledge of climate change should play a key role in the curriculum. As Singh (2021) writes,...

Editorial: Spotlight on language and literacy

Findings from studies captured in this special issue make for compelling reading about the direction of language and literacy research in the UK and further afield. Ian Collen, from Queen’s...

The change in science language as a result of transition from primary to secondary school

When students move from primary to secondary school, one of the numerous challenges that they encounter is language. The language of school academic activity is importantly different from the...

Spotlight on language and literacy

This special issue of the BERA Blog places a spotlight on educational research in the field of language and literacy. Covering a range of topics from modern language learning to language as an...

Principals’ perceptions of the teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)

Within the ‘Principals as STEM Leaders – Building the Evidence Base for Improved STEM Learning’ project, funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment,...

‘Learning for All’

BERA funded six small grants in 2022/23 under the title “Learning for all”. These grants supported projects which examine educational provision in its widest sense that seeks to provide or...

How science capital helps to understand the urban–rural divide in Chinese students’ science aspirations

BERA Early Career Researcher Network Symposium Series 2022

Chinese students were reported to have relatively low science aspirations, which contrasts with their outstanding attainment in international student assessment (OECD, 2019). Meanwhile, a bigger...

Food technology, home economics, cooking, or healthy eating? Making a case for the term ‘food literacy’

Increasingly, UK policy recommendations include food education. For example, the Levelling Up white paper recommends children leave school knowing ‘how to cook six recipes’ (LUHC, 2022); the...

Climate change education: What do we know about the sources of information teachers are using?

Teachers can access a huge amount of information. The quantities are so vast they’re hard to comprehend. On a daily basis, more than 3.5 billion Google searches are conducted, more than 3.3...

Has Athena Swan lost its way?

The Athena Swan charter was established in 2005 to advance the careers of female academics in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM). Yet it now discourages academic...

Ofsted’s subject review of science: Could it put science into a subject silo?

It is one of the most heated debates in education forums around the world: is it better to teach lessons in discipline silos, or should schools create timetables that emphasise cross-cutting...