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Much ado about something: The effects of the National Student Survey on higher education

This research (for the British Academy/Leverhulme) set out to gather evidence on the effects of the National Student Survey (NSS) ten years after its introduction. The effects of the survey go...

When the poor relation comes to town! Education’s contribution to social science research methods

Maintaining global competitiveness in a fast-changing data landscape requires ongoing investment of resource For some time the development of research capacity has been a concern amongst...

How do you measure a national curriculum?

One of the trends in educational research has been towards more sophisticated understandings about which research methods are appropriate to answer particular research questions. For example a...

Student Councils: Partnerships and Arguments

I read somewhere (maybe in J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but I stand to be corrected) about events in some prisoner of war camps in Singapore, as the Japanese troops withdrew towards the end...

Educational researchers and their living-educational-theories

In this, my first contribution to the BERA blog, I hope to stimulate debate by sharing some differences of opinion with other researchers in BERA. My intention is to emphasise the importance of...

Teachers in further education: more standards, not yet a profession?

Further education (FE) colleges – how they work, what happens in them, who studies in them, who works in them – always seem to get shunted to the margins. They are under-funded, relatively...

Accidents will happen…but why is there so little educational research on disasters?

On the 21st October 1966 forty thousand cubic metres of coal debris from a badly maintained National Coal Board waste site in Aberfan, South Wales, destroyed the Pantglas junior school below. ...

Why don’t we have Counter-factuals? We could learn a lot

Historians write counter-factuals:  brief papers that speculate about ‘what ifs?’  For example if William of Normandy had lost the battle of Hastings in 1066 what would the UK have looked...

White Working-Class Boys’ Learner Identities in Neoliberal Times

In the United Kingdom, it is widely documented both in academic circles and in the popular press that white working-class children consistently underperform at school and are less likely to attend...

Using the physical environment to improve education

It might seem as if buildings, the physical location of education, are of only tangential interest to an education researcher: something that can be left to architects in the same way as the human...

Teaching Maths for Social Justice

Teaching mathematics is a social justice issue. Despite numerous calls from the mathematics education community, the curriculum in England remains stubbornly resistant to change. Too many...

Researching with young and developmentally young children: Ethical considerations, dilemmas and compromises

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

One of the most challenging considerations when researching with children is the question of gaining their consent to participate in research and their perspectives on the topic under study....