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...

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...

Aesthetic education: Recent thoughts on old problems

Aesthetic education is usually concerned with the role of arts appreciation in students’ personal development. Its advocates often pitch it in opposition to instrumentalism, but in doing so,...

General Election 2019: Where do the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems stand on education?

What can we expect from the three main UK political parties if elected to government? I have compared the education sections of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos. (All...

School accountability by Progress 8: A critique of Conservative and Labour proposals

The Conservatives and Labour hold different views on the future of England’s system of school accountability by Progress 8. However, both parties’ thinking is at odds with the research...

‘Me, my selfie and I’: An exploration of children’s perceptions of social media – a PhD pilot study

Numbers of users of social media has increased dramatically in recent years with children and young people recognised as heavy adopters of this virtual social network (Richards, Caldwell, & Go,...

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...

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...

Escape from the Skinner box

Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is very much in the public eye, the issue of its use in education has attracted much attention, both good and bad. Within the context of education, one...

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,...

Tackling educational inequality

The questions, ‘What does the empirical evidence tell us about the achievement gap?’ and ‘What is proven good practice for closing the gap in educational inequality?’, are the subject of...

The use of technology in education and its potential to heal liberated Iraq

While information and communication technology (ICT) has been integrated into education for the last three decades in many parts of the world, this has not been the case in Iraq. ICT was...