The teacher recruitment freefall: Opening the parachute requires us to understand our prospective teachers better

In their BERA Blog post ‘Dropping off a cliff’ Innes et al. (2023) break down four areas of policy which they suggest are the ‘real driver’ of frighteningly low teacher training...

Exploring open approaches to digital literacy

The notion of open educational resources (OER) was set out in the ‘Cape Town Open Education Declaration’ (2007), calling on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their...

BERA Bites, issue 8: Toward a digital future of curriculum, pedagogy & assessment

BERA Bites

In the last three decades, digital technologies have become an integral part of our lives, societies and education systems worldwide. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns since early...

The case of a higher education journal: Assessment and evaluation in higher education

I’ve edited Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, or AEHE for short, for a decade now. Before that I edited Studies in Higher Education for a similar period, and before that Higher...

Education: The State of the Discipline. Survey of education researchers

A survey of education researchers’ work, experiences and identities

Through a glass, darkly: Gazing into the field of carers in academia

Research on higher education students and staff with caring responsibilities has quickly expanded since the 2000s, gaining further momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying...

Complex realism and educational research

My current ESRC-funded PhD research crosses the boundaries of linear thinking by drawing on ‘complex realism’ – the conceptual framework through which I investigate the mechanisms that lead...

Using learning contracts in large-group teaching: Preliminary findings

There is no doubt that most academics have an overarching goal that is to develop their students into self-directed and autonomous learners. Evidence from the literature on contract learning...

What can essay mills teach us about artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence in educational research and practice

Academics are increasingly warned that cheating assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) could pose new challenges to the world of learning and teaching (Cotton et al., 2023). To understand the...

Editorial: Action research: Research into action

Action research: Research into action

Lisa Pettifer, head of professional development in a large secondary school in England, proclaimed in her blog post Living with research in 2015 that, from a practitioner perspective, ‘…the...

Action research: Research into action

A number of BERA events between 2020 and 2022 enabled researchers to come together from a range of different education settings (primary, secondary, tertiary and higher education). These events...

Spring 2023

Research Intelligence issue 154: Education: The State of the Discipline