Halting the rise of character education in Britain

Character education has risen up the political agenda in the UK in recent years, as it has in a number of other countries. The United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan have...

Natural language processing: A tool for microgenetic analysis

Microgenetic analysis is a Vygotskyan educational research method that supports uncovering student sense-making activity during collaborative learning. Investigating learning using microgenetic...

BERA Blog highlights from 2019

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’ to all our BERA Blog readers here in the UK and around the world in this, our fourth end-of-year-highlights special edition. The BB continues to grow, with more special...

What I meant and the respondent assumed: Improving survey questions with cognitive interviews

When we gather survey data about human perceptions and attitudes, do we elicit answers to what we really ask? How far can self-administered questionnaires (Schwarz, 1999), with no interviewer...

The success of Finnish schools: Lessons from a high-performing system

I have recently returned from Tampere University in Finland as part of an Erasmus project called Academic Adventures, and in this blog post I want to share some reflections from that week about...

Gender and sexual identities in early childhood curricula: The case of Canada

Research concerning the intersections between early childhood education and subjectivities has been ubiquitous (see for example, Olmedo & Wilkins, 2016; Ritchie, 2008); yet despite prominent...

Educational leadership: Post-conference reflections on an ever-changing field

As it is for many of my colleagues BERA’s Annual Conference is one of the highlights of my academic year. It’s the one conference that I try not to miss – not only to see my annual...

Children’s awareness and understanding of conflict-related groups in divided education systems

Over 420 million children live in conflict-affected areas (Save the Children, 2019). Conflict greatly disrupts education, with long-lasting negative effects even after peace agreements are signed...

Chinglish versus China English: A need to determine ‘correct’ English among our Chinese students

Mention ‘Chinglish’ to Chinese students and they’ll probably giggle nervously. The term was coined to describe the attempts of Chinese people to use English, with the implication being that...

Wellbeing by acronym: Simplifying the complex?

Among the few shared understandings of the concept of wellbeing are that it is complex, multidimensional and eludes easy definition and measurement. As research and policy attention have gathered...

Decoding computer models to advance mechanistic reasoning

Using models to understand how and why a natural phenomenon emerges is a fundamental practice in the sciences. Analysing the underlying components and interactions that generate a phenomenon is...

The ethics of using pedagogical agents in intelligent tutoring systems

Recognising that learning is a social activity, intelligent tutoring systems enable learners to engage in (virtual) face-to-face social interactions with autonomous animated software characters,...