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
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
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?
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