During the COVID pandemic, the advice was strikingly consistent: keep moving. Go for a walk, go for a run, stay active for your mental health. That advice did not come out of nowhere. It was already grounded in research at the time. And we know physical exercise has many benefits. But now we know more… Read More Meta-meta-analysis: Exercise helps mental health. But not always in the same way
You have probably heard it before: sleep on it, and suddenly everything will fall into place. It is the idea that dreams can be a source of insight and help you solve problems. Or at least that a good night’s sleep can. A recent study by Konkoly and colleagues tries to capture that idea experimentally.… Read More Dreaming of solutions? What a clever study actually shows (and what it does not)
It is an idea that keeps returning in how we think about education. Something that has been around for centuries. I tend to associate it strongly with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If we just shift far enough from explanation to discovery, from directing to guiding, things will fall into place. More active learning is better learning. It… Read More Who Benefits from Which Instruction? What a New Study Says About SES and Teaching Approaches
Besides the well-being of pupils and students, we also, fortunately, sometimes talk about the well-being of teachers. Often, implicitly, we link this to a promise. If teachers feel better, better learning outcomes and more well-being among pupils will follow automatically. But this blog is almost always about this question: what do we actually know about… Read More Teacher and student wellbeing. A logical story, complex evidence
This is a true little gem. For people who know, they will see the joke inside the joke. Found this cartoon here. Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
Ah, the replication crisis. One of my favourite topics. And yes, here is another example. This one involves beer. In 1995, a study appeared that was almost too good not to cite. It looked at waiters and bartenders at Oktoberfest, who were said to perform worse on a simple physics task than people without experience… Read More Even Oktoberfest is not immune to the replication crisis
The digital divide – and its effect on reading – is often framed as a question of access. Those with fewer resources have fewer devices and less bandwidth. Those with more resources have more technology. It sounds simple. Too simple. And it ignores a common mistake in how we think about inequality called Gap Thinking.… Read More The digital divide is often not where we think it is
Recently, an unusually large systematic review of language learning and communication strategies was published, written by Javad Belali and Reza Khany. The authors analysed more than 400 studies, spanning roughly 50 years of research on second and foreign language acquisition. Their central question was straightforward: which strategies genuinely help learners improve their proficiency, and under… Read More Metacognition works in language learning, but what does that say about education research?
Sometimes, a finding does not overturn a field but quietly reframes it. That is how I read the recent population-based study in The BMJ by Caroline Fyfe and colleagues on time trends in the male-to-female ratio in autism diagnoses. For decades, the story seemed relatively stable. Autism spectrum disorder was said to be three to… Read More Rethinking the Male to Female Ratio in Autism
We like to tell ourselves that education is an elevator. If you have talent and show effort, you go up. The path may be steep, but the rules are clear and apply to everyone. For a long time, that story held some truth. In places like Flanders, education did function as a powerful engine of… Read More Meritocracy Is Not an Elevator, but an Escalator with Missing Steps