XFacebookYouTubeLinkedInEmail

Search results for: survey

Need a new search?

If you didn't find what you were looking for, try a new search!

What causes behaviour?

2017-08-24T17:29:34+01:00August 10th, 2017|research|

The age-old debate as to what causes human behaviour - nature vs nurture - shows little sign of running out of steam, despite having been emphatically resolved as far as science is concerned.  Although all knowledge is contingent and no scientist worthy of the name would ever say there are no facts established completely beyond doubt, the mountains of evidence that have piled up in favour of genetic causes for behaviour as opposed to environmental ones is solemnly impressive. No one argues that genes are wholly responsible for how we behave or that the environment has no effect on how we [...]

Getting culture right Part 1: Normative messages

2017-08-02T15:25:28+01:00August 2nd, 2017|behaviour, psychology|

If you want to change anything within a school, culture is crucial. As Tom Bennett argues in Creating a Culture: How school leaders can optimise behaviour, culture is "the way we do things round here". His advice to school leaders is to purposely design the culture you want in your school and then work hard to communicate your vision so that it becomes something that lives in the minds of everyone within the school community. Easy to say, hard to do. Any attempt to change culture has to start with acknowledging and then shifting what's considered socially normal. If the social norm [...]

A Novice→Expert Model of Learning

2018-01-07T15:09:36+00:00June 21st, 2017|learning|

Every artist was first an amateur. Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the best understood principles of cognitive psychology is that novices learn and think differently to experts. These labels are domain-specific, not person-specific; I can be an expert at particle physics whilst still being a novice at evolutionary biology. Or skateboarding. Similarly, you could be an expert skateboarder whilst knowing little of nothing about theatre design or ancient Tibetan languages. What this means is that we're all novices at something, and many of us will be experts in at least one domain. To demonstrate how you think differently as an expert [...]

What do teachers believe?

2017-03-16T20:49:30+00:00March 16th, 2017|research|

It's well-established that various 'myths' about how students' learn are remarkably persistent in the face of contradictory evidence. In 2014, Paul Howard-Jones' article, Neuroscience and education: myths and messages revealed the extent of teachers' faulty beliefs: In the UK, 93% of teachers believe that matching instruction to students' preferred learning style is a good idea, 88% believed in some form of Brain Gym, with 91% being convinced by the left-brain-right brain hypothesis. He concludes with the following: Neuromyths are misconceptions about the brain that flourish when cultural conditions protect them from scrutiny. Their form is influenced by a range of biases in how we [...]

What’s so great about making mistakes?

2017-03-16T08:06:20+00:00March 15th, 2017|Featured|

To err is human. Alexander Pope Making mistakes is an inevitable part of life. We're all wrong about something at some point. Equally obviously, contending with failure, learning to drag ourselves up by the bootstraps when we fall down and persist in the face of setbacks is part and parcel of human existence. But is making mistakes something to aim for? Should failure be celebrated?  Clearly, in some areas of human endeavour mistakes cannot be tolerated. We are much more tolerant of failure in education than in, say, aviation, because the stakes are so much lower. If we mess things up [...]

Bottom sets and the scourge of low-level disruption

2016-11-14T21:10:57+00:00November 14th, 2016|behaviour|

In many English schools, low-level disruption is the norm. Children talking when expected to be silent, fiddling with equipment and each other, calling out, and generally not being 'on task' are all routinely accepted as just something with which teachers have to contend. In 2014, Ofsted published this report on low-level disruption in schools. It it, "around two-fifths of the 723 teachers in the survey who believed that disruptive ‘talking and chatting’ was a key problem said it occurred in almost every lesson." The entire concept of 'behaviour management' is predicated on the idea that teachers must manage students' inevitable disruptive [...]

What causes the gender gap in education?

2016-09-26T13:27:25+01:00September 25th, 2016|Featured|

In the 1940s the Belgian philosopher Albert Michotte identified our tendency to believe we could see causality. His book, The Perception of Causality, published in French in 1945 showed how certain very simple visual sequences carry the appearance of causal connectedness. Click this link for an example. This paper is a good recent update on how illusions of causality bias our judgement. Human beings are natural pattern seekers. We see shapes in clouds, faces in wallpaper and meaning where there is just random noise. In particular, we believe we can see causes when all we can actually see are effects. In teaching, [...]

What Dr Fox teaches us about the importance of subject knowledge

2016-09-04T19:23:11+01:00September 4th, 2016|psychology|

In 1970, psychologists and psychiatrists were invited to a lecture on "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education." The lecture, supposedly given by Dr Myron L. Fox, a graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a student of the great John van Neumann, was actually given by an actor who knew nothing about either Game Theory or Physical Education.The audience of MDs and PhDs were in fact unwitting subjects in a study conducted by Donald Naftulin, John Ware, and Frank Donnelly on 'educational seduction'. They were divided into two groups; one group was given a lecture by an actual scientist [...]

“There are no wrong answers!”

2019-06-03T08:52:59+01:00June 18th, 2016|English|

Along with, "It's a skills based subject," the cry that there are no wrong answers in English is, I think pretty unhelpful. Take the example of teaching Priestley's perennial, An Inspector Calls. Every time we've finished the play, without fail, a body of students will be firmly persuaded that poor, unloved Eva Smith was murdered by the Inspector. I'm not going to bore you with why this interpretation is so wrong-headed, just take it from me that goes against everything that Priestley was trying to achieve. When I've pointed out - precisely and at length - why this view is incorrect, [...]

A marked decline? The EEF’s review of the evidence on written marking

2016-05-19T10:45:32+01:00May 18th, 2016|assessment|

Question: How important is it for teachers to provide written feedback on students' work? Answer: No one knows. This is essentially the substance of the Education Endowment Foundation's long-awaited review on written marking. The review begins with the following admission: ...the review found a striking disparity between the enormous amount of effort invested in marking books, and the very small number of robust studies that have been completed to date. While the evidence contains useful findings, it is simply not possible to provide definitive answers to all the questions teachers are rightly asking. [my emphasis] But then they go and spoil it all by [...]

Toggle Sliding Bar Area
Go to Top