This post is unique on this blog. Yesterday, I simply could not find anything ‘bloggable’ in my RSS feeds. There was nothing among my Scholar suggestions and nothing on EurekAlert that I had not already blogged about. So, in the end, for the first time I asked AI whether there were any new studies that… Read More Letting students assess each other’s work? The teacher remains crucial
A year ago, I wrote a rant about Alpha schools. A few times a year, I let myself go. No, this will not be a new rant. Sorry. But in my post and the follow-up post, I argued that we couldn’t separate Alpha School’s spectacular claims from the extraordinarily selective population it serves. Now we… Read More Do We Know the Alpha and Omega of Alpha School?
I once did research myself into what makes a teacher a ‘real teacher’ in the eyes of their students. This was and is not an easy question. The question ‘What makes someone a good teacher?’ is also one of those questions almost everyone thinks they have an answer to, but the discussions start once you… Read More What makes a good teacher? A lot of research confirms what you probably already thought
We all start life from unequal positions. James Heckman once argued that being born is the greatest source of inequality. And, in a way, education is one of our attempts to undo some of this. Now suppose children receive a good preschool education at age 4 and, as a result, build an advantage over children… Read More Can Better Education Make an Earlier Advantage Look Smaller?
I’m afraid I’m the second type in this video, and my colleagues might hate me for it. Sorry! Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
I want to discuss a new study on PIAAC, the lesser-known adult sibling of PISA. PIAAC measures, among other things, literacy and numeracy among adults, while PISA assesses related skills among 15-year-olds. There was something in the Flemish results in 2024 that fascinated me. I wrote on my Dutch blog: By 2012, average PISA scores… Read More PISA scores fall. PIAAC scores don’t. How can that be?
This blog has an AI problem. No, not because it was written by AI (although I translated it with AI’s help). Or rather, I have an AI research problem. The problem is that I am increasingly unsure which new studies on AI and education are still worth discussing here. I have a monthly podcast in… Read More This blog has an AI problem
We are in the final week of the summer holiday here in Flanders. Many parents, and even quite a few pupils, if they are honest, will say that the summer break is simply too long. It is a discussion that comes back with some regularity, and one I get called about every few months. And… Read More Should the summer holiday be shorter, or perhaps longer?
My wife was at a conference in Finland last week and sent me this link, along with the slide below, saying, “this might be interesting for your blog.” At first sight, it is about a large-scale experiment in which children in Finland start something resembling kindergarten a year earlier, at five instead of six. Primary… Read More Who actually expects the most from educational innovation?
Anyone who has been following my work and this blog for a while will know that I am quite interested in collective teacher efficacy and collective student efficacy. This post is related to the first of these concepts. Depending on the type of school you work in, there are subject departments, working groups, professional learning… Read More A team meeting does not make a team