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
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?
Let me start with an easy confession: I hate meetings. And I am pretty sure I am not the only one. There are a few things employees seem to agree on as quickly as meetings. There are too many of them, and they last too long. And how often have you thought that the meeting… Read More Bad news: all those meetings might actually be a good thing
When you read a scientific article, research can sometimes seem like a remarkably emotionless process. First, the researchers formulate a hypothesis. Next, they conduct an experiment. Then they analyse the data and draw a conclusion. Anyone who does research themselves knows, of course, that it rarely feels that way. On the contrary, it is a… Read More In the scientist’s mind
After all the PISA hype, here is a study that is only indirectly related to education! A massive new study in Nature provides important new insights into the link between our personality and our genes. For this, the (truly ridiculous number of) researchers combined data from 46 cohorts. The number of participants ranged from well… Read More Genes matter for personality, but they don’t determine it
Yesterday, I wrote about the new PISA 2025 results, and my post ended with a question to explore: what happens if, instead of looking at the United Kingdom (UK) as a whole, as reported in the OECD’s first Volume, we look at England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland separately? So, this post delivers on that… Read More A promise is a promise: PISA in the United Kingdom (what can we learn?)
As I post this, the embargo has been lifted, and articles about PISA 2025 are appearing on news websites around the world. And yes, there is plenty of bad news to report. In many education systems, the results are still moving in the wrong direction. A few years ago, it looked as if these results… Read More And here it is… PISA (a slightly idiosyncratic dip into the grab bag)