Research Matters
A colleague recently applauded the professionalism of educators, quoting in particular the ‘inquisitive minds’ they possess. The positive definitions of inquisitiveness - inclined to...
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Much ado about something: The effects of the National Student Survey on higher education
This research (for the British Academy/Leverhulme) set out to gather evidence on the effects of the National Student Survey (NSS) ten years after its introduction. The effects of the survey go...
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When the poor relation comes to town! Education’s contribution to social science research methods
Maintaining global competitiveness in a fast-changing data landscape requires ongoing investment of resource For some time the development of research capacity has been a concern amongst...
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How do you measure a national curriculum?
One of the trends in educational research has been towards more sophisticated understandings about which research methods are appropriate to answer particular research questions. For example a...
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Student Councils: Partnerships and Arguments
I read somewhere (maybe in J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but I stand to be corrected) about events in some prisoner of war camps in Singapore, as the Japanese troops withdrew towards the end...
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Teachers in further education: more standards, not yet a profession?
Further education (FE) colleges – how they work, what happens in them, who studies in them, who works in them – always seem to get shunted to the margins. They are under-funded, relatively...
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Educational researchers and their living-educational-theories
In this, my first contribution to the BERA blog, I hope to stimulate debate by sharing some differences of opinion with other researchers in BERA. My intention is to emphasise the importance of...
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Accidents will happen…but why is there so little educational research on disasters?
On the 21st October 1966 forty thousand cubic metres of coal debris from a badly maintained National Coal Board waste site in Aberfan, South Wales, destroyed the Pantglas junior school below. ...
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Why don’t we have Counter-factuals? We could learn a lot
Historians write counter-factuals: brief papers that speculate about ‘what ifs?’ For example if William of Normandy had lost the battle of Hastings in 1066 what would the UK have looked...
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White Working-Class Boys’ Learner Identities in Neoliberal Times
In the United Kingdom, it is widely documented both in academic circles and in the popular press that white working-class children consistently underperform at school and are less likely to attend...
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Using the physical environment to improve education
It might seem as if buildings, the physical location of education, are of only tangential interest to an education researcher: something that can be left to architects in the same way as the human...
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Teaching Maths for Social Justice
Teaching mathematics is a social justice issue. Despite numerous calls from the mathematics education community, the curriculum in England remains stubbornly resistant to change. Too many...
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