We often perceive competition as something bad in education. I promise this blog post will not be a plea to simply reintroduce it. But I’m bringing this topic up because a new study by Corwin Senko and Sarah Pallone suggests that perhaps we should not only look at if students want to perform better than… Read More Can a little competition be good for learning?
I had some reservations about posting this Onion cartoon, as some people may find it offensive. On the other hand, I thought it was thought-provoking enough to spark some discussion. And I have to admit, it also made me smile a bit. Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
The first PISA 2025 results have been out for a while now. Two weeks later, there are still a few puzzles in them that keep occupying my mind. I have already discussed one of them with several people over the past few days. However, I thought I would share my musings here as well. I… Read More A PISA puzzle I cannot quite let go of
This blog post is not another round in the well-known reading wars! Okay, now that that is out of the way, what is this new study actually about? Well, while there is quite a lot of evidence that explicitly and systematically teaching the connections between letters and sounds, or systematic phonics, is an important part… Read More It is not only phonics that is important, but also how you teach phonics!
Some of the most popular guidance reports my own organisation Leerpunt has published discuss differentiation in education. This reminded me of a study I read a while ago that hadn’t become a blog post until now. The question the researchers posed in their paper seems quite simple at first glance: what do you, as a… Read More What do teachers need to differentiate effectively?
This research has been sitting in an open tab in my browser for a while. I read it back when the post about the umbrella review of fifteen meta-analyses on project-based learning was published, but I didn’t want to write a similar post two days in a row. At the time, the conclusion was quite… Read More Gamification shows once again that the question ‘what works?’ is too simple.
It is an example I sometimes use in my lectures: suppose you give perfect feedback. Will your student have learned? Dylan Wiliam described eight possible reactions to feedback, but only two of them lead to more learning. The simplest situation in which this does not happen is when the pupil or student ignores the feedback.… Read More Receiving feedback is not the same as using feedback
The process of selecting studies or topics for my blog is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. I have to admit that it can be very tempting to go for large studies or striking results. I know from experience that these can generate more ‘clicks’. But I personally found last weekend’s study about the feelings scientists experience… Read More Explicit instruction or inquiry-based learning? Perhaps that’s the wrong question
The most difficult thing in education is not transfer, although it comes close. Nor is it trying to get rid of learning styles, although I’m still doing my very best. No, the most difficult thing in education is scaling up. Many doomed stories in education usually start with someone who looks at conventional schools and… Read More Schools are not apps. Why do we keep forgetting this?
On Friday, my wife sent me this study. James Bruce Tomblin and colleagues followed a group of people for about thirty years. They observed them from kindergarten until their mid-thirties. The researchers wanted to know whether differences in oral language ability at a young age could predict the socioeconomic position people would reach much later… Read More Can childhood language ability predict where we end up 30 years later?