Why does a child feel connected to a school, or not? It is a place where they spend many hours of their lives, yet they may click or not. Research into this question already exists, but remarkably, many of those studies focus on adolescents or older pupils. A new study in the British Educational Research Journal, therefore,… Read More What makes children feel connected to school?
One of the underlying things I keep returning to on this blog is how difficult humans are with uncertainty. We like certainty. Clear answers. Strong predictions. Education debates are full of them, too. Yet reality rarely cooperates that neatly. This short BBC Ideas video featuring statistician David Spiegelhalter offers a remarkably accessible introduction to Bayesian… Read More Why Bayesian Thinking Matters More Than Ever
I sometimes feel like I am repeating myself. But the effects of the smartphone ban debate in schools continue to make for interesting research. For instance, a new NBER working paper by Henry Saffer attempts to causally investigate, for the first time, the effects of school-wide smartphone bans in the United Statesfor the first time . Jonathan… Read More Smartphone bans and mental health: new study tempers major claims
Social-emotional learning, or SEL as it is often abbreviated, remains one of those topics where discussions veer off in all directions remarkably quickly. For some, it is almost the solution to everything that goes wrong in education: from bullying to learning deficits, and from well-being to citizenship. For others, it has become nothing more than… Read More Does social-emotional learning really work? A new meta-analysis on prosocial behavior adds nuance to the debate.
Sometimes it feels as if everyone suddenly wants to think critically, or at least wants schools to teach children how to do it. It appears in curricula, policy documents, vision statements, and endless discussions about so-called “21st century skills,” as if critical thinking were not needed before the 21st century. Teachers are expected to foster… Read More What Is Critical Thinking, Actually?
Lately, some discussions on Twitter/X got me thinking again about a surprisingly old educational question: is learning fundamentally social or not? Part of the debate was triggered by discussions around AI-driven schools like Alpha School, where students spend far less time in traditional instruction and much more time in highly individualised learning environments supported by… Read More Is Learning Social? AI Schools Are Reopening an Old Debate
During a talk in Belgium last week, I was asked a question by a school leader that I seem to hear more and more often: Why are we seeing so many more diagnoses, such as ADHD, than before? Is there really an explosive increase? Have children changed? Or are we looking differently? Not coincidentally, shortly… Read More Why Are ADHD Diagnoses Rising Worldwide? A Different Perspective on a Complex Debate
Working together in maths class works. At least, that seems to be the conclusion of a new systematic review published in the British Educational Research Journal. Patricia Hampson and colleagues examined research on cooperative learning in mathematics classes with students aged 11 to 16. Their conclusion is quite positive: in eight of the nine selected… Read More Cooperative Learning in Mathematics: Effective, But Only When Done Well
Whenever an international report, such as the recent IELS study, is published, reactions quickly follow that basically amount to: “See? My solution was right all along.” I’m probably guilty of that myself from time to time. So today I wanted to try something different by putting two very different sources next to each other to… Read More Why do differences between children appear so early in life?
A lot of AI research in education currently suffers from the same problem: small samples, short interventions, weak control groups, and, surprisingly, large conclusions about how “AI is transforming education.” The result is that for researchers, and honestly for me as well, reading the literature often feels like carefully weeding through a huge amount of… Read More One of the better AI-in-education studies? ChatGPT feedback versus teacher feedback