BERA Blog highlights from 2018

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal welcome to all our BERA Blog readers in the UK and around the world in this, our third end-of-year-highlights special edition. And what a year this has turned out to be. (I really will...

Teaching as design: New research from technology-rich learning environments

  ‘We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for...

Optimising support for children with ADHD in schools

The school environment can be particularly challenging for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Pupils diagnosed with ADHD are typically restless, act without thinking...

Integrating a parenting education programme into the primary and secondary school curriculum in Nigeria

All young children tend to misbehave from time to time, which makes it necessary for parents/guardians to step in with disciplinary measures. Although the need for child discipline is broadly...

Can biology A-levels be trusted to look after the future teaching of high quality ecological science?

‘The primary place in which to work at ecology is necessarily in the field’ Tansley (1952/1987) Most contemporary ecologists could not envisage a world without fieldwork....

The challenge of researching dialogic interactions in digital classroom contexts

Language is the most ubiquitous and flexible of the meaning-making tools. As such, it is a teacher’s main pedagogic tool (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). ‘Classroom dialogue’ can be thought of as...

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment-aware schools to redefine the landscape

The starting point for our article (Parker & Levinson, 2018) was the apparent contradiction in current government policy between an essentially top-down, ‘zero tolerance’ behaviourist model of...

Confusion, contradiction and exclusion: The problems of British values and the national curriculum in history teaching

From 2010, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition began to reassess the teaching of history in schools across the key stages of the national curriculum in England and Wales. After...

Action research in the classroom: Applying spacing and retrieval practice

I have been a classroom teacher for nearly two decades, but have only recently undertaken action research. In this post I describe my experiences with spacing (Bjork & Bjork, 2014; Cepeda et al,...

Hopes and fears: The development of a new curriculum in Wales

Since 2015, ‘pioneer’ schools across Wales have been contributing to the development of a new national curriculum based on Professor Graham Donaldson’s (2015) report, Successful Futures. As...

Through adversity comes strength: Educational policy reform and developing research capacity in Wales

Introducing a special issue of the BERA Blog on education in Wales, to mark the conference, ‘The future of educational research in Wales’, held in Cardiff on 14 November 2018. Education...

A new tool to help teachers as digital learning designers

We began with a sense of mission: to support teachers in making effective use of learning technologies. Educational research has done little so far to help teachers into the digital age; policy...