I enjoy learning new things myself, so this past weekend I not only spoke at ResearchED NYC but also attended several sessions. I would like to briefly reflect on Ben Lovett’s talk about test anxiety. We had a very small audience for him, which surprised me. I consider the subject to be very topical, and… Read More Test anxiety: less about performance, more about preparation
Sometimes confirmation comes faster than expected. Last Saturday in New York, I argued that the real issue with AI in education is not a lack of studies, but a lack of good studies. And that a lot of people are drawing conclusions far too quickly from what is available. Today, I came across this post… Read More Extra evidence for one of the main points of my talk past Saturday in NYC: major article on AI in education retracted
I thought I’d start the week with a proper hot topic in education. There’s certainly no shortage of opinions about grouping students by attainment. Whether we’re talking about tracking (separating students into different programmes or pathways), setting (ability grouping within schools), or broader comprehensive models, the debate tends to return in the same form. Do… Read More Mixed attainment vs ability grouping: less about averages, more about trade-offs
Since slightly less research made the selection for my blog over the past few weeks, I am also taking a look at the studies I placed on the ‘to read someday’ pile. This one is from October 2024, but remains highly relevant. This study by Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon examines the state of… Read More Looking beyond the teacher shortage: 50 years of the profession
There is currently no shortage of opinions on AI in education. What remains scarce, however, is solid evidence. That makes the recent report, The Evidence Base on AI in K-12: A 2026 Review, interesting. Not because it brings spectacular conclusions, but precisely because it does not. It exposes just how thin the real knowledge base still is,… Read More AI in education: what 800 studies do (and don’t) tell us
*Update*: Daniël Muijs sent me this link. I’ve added this to this blog! This blog exists because of the almighty RSS feeds. When I checked my Old Reader today, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This is what I saw: I haven’t clicked on every single article, but this is an example of one of the… Read More This morning’s RSS feed: a wave of BERA retractions (and what it says about academic publishing)
We remain remarkably stubborn in our belief that learning and development can be improved by adding something “on the side.” An intervention, a programme, a training. Something psychological, something cognitive, something layered on top of regular education. Think of self-efficacy, executive functions, or motivation programmes. Somewhere in all of this sits an implicit promise: if… Read More Stop adding interventions. Start improving teaching.
There is no shortage of opinions about AI in education at the moment. New tools, new promises, new concerns. And increasingly, new studies. The past weekend in Tokyo I also had many talks about the subject (thank you Carl, Barb and the infamous many others). But if you take a step back, something odd appears.… Read More Does AI work in education? It’s the question everyone is asking. It is also the wrong one.
There is a growing body of research on AI in education, but strikingly often it remains at the same level: does it work better with or without AI? That, in itself, is an interesting question, but it misses something fundamental. It says little about what actually changes in teachers’ work. A recent preprint by Kramer… Read More What does AI do to the work of teachers? Beyond the question of whether it works
There are studies you read and immediately think: this is going to be interpreted in ways the authors did not intend. This is one of them. A new paper in the British Educational Research Journal analyses more than two decades of PISA data (2000–2022) across eleven European countries and asks a seemingly simple question: do… Read More Private schools sometimes perform better. But that’s not the full story