In recent years, I have regularly heard that AI systems work with attention. It is no coincidence that this word reappears in the title of the famous article that made the current generation of language models possible: Attention is All You Need, a paper published 9 years ago today. But how comparable is that attention actually to human… Read More Does AI have an attention problem?
Board games have made a remarkable comeback in recent years. I have noticed game shops and board game cafés popping up in my own area. They have also appeared increasingly often in educational research, particularly in studies exploring ways to support executive functions in primary school. That is hardly surprising. Good board games are affordable,… Read More Today We’re Playing a Game… in Class?
In recent years, I have often written about the replication crisis in psychology. This development, which I see as a welcome correction, is difficult to separate from another longstanding feature of academic life: publish or perish. Universities still largely evaluate scientists based on their publication record. The unintended consequences of that system have is subject… Read More What Happens When Researchers Open the File Drawer?
School attendance is once again high on the agenda. Rates of absenteeism are on the rise in several countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic is often seen as an accelerator of this trend, partly because it disrupted routines and changed perceptions of school attendance. We have long known that frequent absence is linked to lower academic… Read More Education policy is family policy: what can work against school absenteeism?
Co-teaching and team teaching are a bit of a personal frustration of mine. They are popular topics, yet there is relatively little research on them worldwide. Fortunately, that is starting to change in Flanders. In 2025, I wrote about a study on the possible impact of team teaching on student learning. Based on the publication… Read More What Do Students Think About Team Teaching?
Yesterday I had the opportunity to open an education conference with a keynote that was slightly different from my usual talks. Instead of starting with a body of research, I began with a question that has been occupying me for quite some time: how do we actually think about education? We have different frameworks. We… Read More A 3×3 Framework for Thinking About Education
The classic movie could have been very different… Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
In 2021, I wrote about a study by Uta Klusmann and colleagues showing that teacher well-being matters not only for teachers themselves but also for what happens in the classroom. Now, largely the same research group published a new study, confirming this picture on a larger, more international scale. The researchers used data from 679… Read More Why Teachers’ Emotions Matter for Student Learning
“Yes, but the context is different.” It is a response I hear regularly and one I sometimes use myself when discussing research from another country. A study from England? Different context. A study from the United States? Different context. I sometimes hesitate to discuss research from China or Japan for the same reason. But before… Read More How Important Is Context in Educational Research?
If you follow the educational literature on motivation, you might easily come away with the impression that motivation primarily arises when students experience autonomy. Give them choices. Let them set their own goals. Provide space for their own interests. That idea has had a great deal of influence over the past decades, even though Ryan… Read More Does Motivation Depend More on Structure Than Autonomy?