Unprofessional misjudgement
No, I’m not using evidence, but I’m not using prejudice either. I am exercising my professional judgement. Sue Cowley It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. Richard Feynman A few days ago I wrote about why we shouldn't credulously accept evidence, and [...]
Evidence and disadvantage: How useful is the EEF Toolkit?
Although everyone's education is important, the education of disadvantaged students is, arguably, of much greater importance than that of students from more advantaged backgrounds. The more privileged your background, the less it's likely to matter what happens at school. Conversely, the more socially disadvantaged your background, the greater the impact of what does, or does not happen at school.Sadly though, access to education is more than likely to experience a Matthew effect. Those [...]
Education isn’t natural – that’s why it’s hard
One of the most troubling conundrums in the field of education is that the common sense observation that children learn so many things simply by virtue of being immersed in an appropriate environment is contradicted by the overwhelming empirical data that explicit instruction outperforms discovery approaches in schools. Why should this be? Surely if children can learn something as complex as speech without much effort, why do we need to [...]
Faith, scepticism and the ‘unswayable minority’
How do you stop people believing myths? The short answer is, it depends on how strongly people believe the myths. I've just read The Debunking Handbook, an excellent, free and succinct (only 9 pages in length!) manual produced by Sceptical Science for tackling misconceptions. In the section on what it refers to as the 'Worldview Backfire Effect' it makes the point that, "You ... stand a greater chance of correcting misinformation [...]
O brave new world! The search for 21st century qualifications
It's difficult to ignore the appealing certainty that the times in which we are alive are unique and fundamentally different to any that have gone before. The most cited reason for this is the fact that the internet has changed everything. Technology has been transforming education for as long as either have been in existence. Language, arguably the most crucial technological advancement in human history, moved education from mere mimicry [...]
Can all of learning be summed up by test scores?
Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not all that bothered about test scores. I mean, obviously I'd far prefer pupils did well rather than poorly on a summative exam, particularly if it is likely to have some bearing on their future life chances - who wouldn't? - but I'm certainly not interested in raising test scores for the sake of raising test scores. Which is why I feel taken aback when [...]
How can school inspection get what it wants?
I read a great piece by Dr Becky Allen in Schools Week this morning on inherent unreliability of school inspections. In it she makes the point that human beings are incapable of making reliable, high stakes judgements due to our adaptive reliance on heuristics and our inability to adequately introspect about our biases and preferences. But despite the dangers, she says, "This is not to say that school inspection should [...]
Is it worth trying to memorise facts?
We can only think about what we know and, no mater how intelligent we might be, we cannot think about something about which we are ignorant. But how well do we need to know things? Is there any point to memorising facts? I had an interesting discussion with some primary maths teachers recently about the benefits of memorising certain basic maths facts. While pretty much everyone agreed that if children had memorised number [...]
War and Peace in education
After a long flight, I've finally finished rereading War and Peace and, if you were in any doubt, it is a masterpiece. I found so much I'd either entirely forgotten or hadn't understood from my first reading over 20 years ago. What particularly struck me was the final chapter from the Second Epilogue. Throughout the book, Tolstoy has been advancing his theory of history as being far more than the will [...]
Knowing the names of things
Many people have written many thousands of words about the difference between knowledge and understanding, but I think Richard Feynman nails it here: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the [...]
Is growth mindset bollocks?
Like everyone else, when I first came across Carol Dweck's theory of growth mindsets I was pretty psyched. There was something so satisfyingly truthy about the way the labels 'fixed' and 'growth' mindset could explain why children failed or succeeded at school. I wanted to believe that something as simple as telling children their brains are 'like a muscle' and showing them a cartoon about synapses forming could make them cleverer. And if praising [...]
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