Doing data differently

As various studies of teachers’ lives and work have explored, using attainment data in schools goes over and above what that data are designed to do. The datafication of schooling in England and...

Silver linings: Lockdown legacies

Covid-19, education and educational research

In my November 2020 BERA Blog, ‘Reading during lockdown: Supporting vulnerable learners’, I reported on the beginnings of a small-scale research project (funded by BERA) to explore the impact...

Education during a pandemic: Lessons from the United Arab Emirates

Covid-19, education and educational research

Even before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic I was wondering, as a teacher and researcher, whether technology and digital platforms would replace teachers and traditional classrooms in the short...

Invest in stopping ineffective things

Schools are hotbeds of innovation. In my role supporting schools to develop more evidence-informed practice, I always admire teachers’ creativity and dedication. However, I also see colleagues...

Learning loss or learning disruption?

Covid-19, education and educational research

Alarm has been expressed about the likely impact of Covid-19 on children’s academic achievement with terms such as ‘closing the gap’, ‘learning loss’ and ‘catch up’ permeating...

The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2020

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A warm and wintery ‘welcome’ to all our readers, wherever you may be. This time last year I wished all of you a seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’, blissfully unaware of how 2020 would play out. Today,...

Winter 2020/2021

Digital technology in education Keeping pace with innovation Research Intelligence issue 145 Just as practitioners are struggling to keep up with the onslaught of new technologies entering the...

Exclusion and the strategic leadership role of special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) in England: Planning for Covid-19 and future crises

Disproportionality (the overrepresentation of specific social groups) in school exclusion data is well documented (DfE, 2019). Similarly, time and funding pressures faced by special educational...

Rethinking class size: The complex story of impact on teaching and learning

The enduring argument over class size is one of the most contested in education. The argument is between many teachers and practitioners who feel that class size makes a big difference to teaching...

Entanglements of writing and matter: Towards less human-centred practices

Over the last decade, the humanities and social sciences have become increasingly interested in the nonhuman (animals, plants, non-living objects) as having agentic and performative capacities. By...

Curriculum integration can support the development of powerful knowledge in education

On 20th March 2015, an article published by the Independent (Garner, 2015) claimed that Finnish schools had scrapped school subjects and replaced them with topics. Ever since then Finland has been...

Only time will tell: Using temporal multimodal analysis to predict learning

By analysing the learning process, one can understand how student behaviours are related to learning outcomes. When assessing the learning process, researchers have shown multimodal learning...