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...

Researchers drawing on teachers’ tools: Picturebooks with migrant learners

This blog post springs from a symposium I convened at BERA Conference 2018 entitled ‘Using creative methods to explore complex topics with young participants’. The symposium reflected my...

Optimising support for children with ADHD in schools

The school environment can be particularly challenging for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Pupils diagnosed with ADHD are typically restless, act without thinking...

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...

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...

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...

To touch or not to touch? Early childhood educators’ beliefs about using touchscreen technologies with our youngest children

The use of touchscreen technologies in the early years has grown, despite strong recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for children under the age of two to have no...

The changing nature of young children’s learning ecologies, experiences and implications for pedagogy in the digital era

Digitalisation has changed the ways of everyday living in the 21st century, and has impacted on the constructions of childhood.* Characterisations such as ‘techno babies’ (O'Connor 2014) or...

BERA Bites: A resource for teachers, lecturers and students from the BERA Blog

The BERA Blog editors are pleased to announce the launch of a new series of publications: BERA Bites, edited collections of selected articles on key topics in education published on the BERA Blog....

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...

Shared understandings of technology to support children’s digital citizenship

For young children, understandings of technology as a cultural tool are both ‘inherited and transformed’ (Rogoff 2003: 51), and often differ from previous generations’ perceptions of...

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...