The current system often claims to assess an apprentice as occupationally competent before they have gained experience of doing the job in the real world. In this post, I argue that college-based knowledge and competence tests cannot support valid inferences about workplace competence and knowledge transfer. Further, I suggest that such competency assessments are a […]
Education policy bingo enthusiasts are rarely disappointed to see a reference to how good East Asian systems are at maths on their cards. The impressive PISA and TIMSS performances of students in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai are never far from the news. In England, East Asian approaches have informed a number of […]
In my last post, I declared myself a big fan of Barak Rosenshine. His writing is sharp and illuminates some interesting ideas around the murky educational debates between teaching skills versus knowledge, and the relative merits of teacher- and student-led activities. Rosenshine’s support for explicit teacher-led skills instruction shows why a binary split between ‘traditional’ […]
In 2014, the Department for Education published a consultation: ‘A world-class teaching profession’. It stated that ‘it is vital that serving teachers have access to on-going, high-quality opportunities to update and refresh their skills and knowledge’ and that ‘evidence-driven, career-long learning is the hallmark of top professions’; also identifying that ‘teachers report that far too […]
Barak Rosenshine’s 1997 article, The Case for Explicit, Teacher-led, Cognitive Strategy Instruction, is only eight pages long, but it is an excellent companion to the long-standing educational debate around ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ approaches to teaching. If you read one thing about education before the new term, I would recommend it. For a start, the paper underlines that […]
You are playing a memory and learning game. Which of these conditions would you find most stressful? Option 1 – get any answers wrong and the game leader will give you an electric shock Option 2 – get any answers wrong and the game leader might give you an electric shock. If you chose […]
Assessment is an important part of any education system. Without assessment, we cannot be sure that students are learning anything, because, as many countries have found, the amount of time students spend in school is a poor guide to how much they have actually learned (Pritchett, 2013). However, assessment is often unpopular with key stakeholders […]
This printable PDF poster includes explanations of a range of key terms from education research, including causation; effect size; Hawthorne effect; practitioner research; control group; empirical research; intervention; randomised controlled trial; correlation; ethics; literature review; sample size; data; evidence-informed practice; peer review; and teacher journal clubs. Download now
Samantha Jones, Advanced Practitioner: Teacher Development and Scholarship, Bedford College, discusses the considerations needed to achieve effective cooperative learning in further education. I have been a lecturer in further education (FE) for 16 years – 12 of these as a business lecturer, and four in teacher education, where I teach on the PGCE PCET […]
Vision for the twenty-first century The World Economic Forum (WEF) Report: New Vision for Education (2015) is based on a detailed analysis of research literature and defines what it considers to be the most crucial skills for twenty-first century citizens worldwide. The WEF states that: To thrive in a rapidly evolving, technology-mediated world, students must […]
