“Learning needs to be fun” quickly turns into a familiar caricature: classrooms where everything has to be enjoyable, where substance gives way to entertainment. Bring it up in a debate, and people immediately know what you mean. And what they think of it. But in pushing back against that caricature, we may have dropped a… Read More Not everything has to be fun. But joy in learning still matters.
Smartphones are disappearing from schools worldwide. Sometimes completely, sometimes partially. According to UNESCO, many education systems have, in recent years, decided to limit or ban their use. This is also becoming a reality closer to home, in Flanders and the Netherlands. Various reasons are cited. In France, the original aim was to protect teachers’ privacy.… Read More Who do smartphone bans actually work for? A view from a different research perspective
You would expect that if you give people complete freedom, things would go in all directions. Give ten groups the same task, without examples, without consultation, and you expect variation. A lot of variation. And you will probably get that. But rarely is that variation completely random. If you look closely, patterns start to appear.… Read More Why languages are not random (and what they have in common)
You look at a pupil or student who is almost there. Their answer or work is no longer really wrong, but not quite right either. And that often feels like good news. We see something to build on, point out what is already working, and offer some encouragement. That makes sense. But this is also… Read More When “almost right” helps less than being wrong
There are a few debates in education that escalate as quickly as those about research. Before we even get to the substance, we are already arguing about paradigms. Positivist. Post-positivist. Interpretative. Critical. As if choosing one lens automatically makes all others irrelevant. After my recent post on a study in Nature (actually 3 studies), I… Read More Educational research is a house with many rooms. But some doors are better left open.
I read a lot of research. Given personal circumstances, even more than usual lately. And while much of what I read mainly seems to confirm what we already know or adds a certain nuance, every now and then I come across a study that makes me think: I had never considered this before. The title… Read More When inclusion falls silent: what teaching in wartime reveals
No Funny on Sunday today as I’m mourning the loss of my grandfather, who passed away yesterday. I want to share one of his favourite songs. Have a nice day, take good care of each other.
This new study by Olivia Miske and many colleagues, published in Nature, is generating a lot of online discussion. Which makes it a good moment to take a closer look and separate fact from fiction. Let’s start with something that already goes wrong repeatedly in the online debate. People use reproducibility and replicability interchangeably, even… Read More What this Nature study really says about education research
Sometimes you read a study that doesn’t really tell you anything new, and yet sharpens things considerably. This is one of those. Johanna Grimm and Tobias Richter looked at whether you can train students to think more “rationally”. In practice, that means relying less on intuition, thinking more systematically, and avoiding common cognitive biases more… Read More Learning to think rationally ≠ learning to argue better
I already raised this on my blog before: when we talk about the increase in mental health problems among young people, these seem to be rising mainly among children from more advantaged backgrounds. At the same time, it remains true, as it has for decades, that young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are on average… Read More Is the mental health crisis amongst young people an elite problem? A longer read on a complex theme!