University of Bristol
Blog post by Claire Lee and Lucy Wenham, School of Education, University of Bristol
As school leaders plan the return to school following the global pandemic, it is crucial that their educational decisions are informed by research into the everyday realities of enforced home learning for children. Much research attention until now has focused, importantly, on lost learning and widening inequalities (e.g. Andrew et al., 2020; Green, 2020). (more…)
By Dr. Simon Brownhill and Dr. Frances Knight, University of Bristol School of Education
A recent report (Moore et al., 2019) placed improving behaviour in schools as a central priority for education contexts. For young people with ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder], the classroom can be a particularly challenging environment for them as they are often more inattentive (Kofler et al., 2008), and display more off-task (Imeraj et al., 2013) and disruptive behaviours (O’Regan, 2018).
As such, young people with ADHD require more support from educators in the classroom, but this is typically hindered by a limited teacher knowledge of ADHD (Kendall, 2016) and of evidence-based ADHD-specific interventions, both in the UK (Moore et al., 2016) and internationally (Arcia et al., 2000). In a review of UK teachers’ own perspectives, Moore et al. (2017) recognise the importance of informed pupil-teacher interactions, and the need for evidence-based interventions to effectively assist educators in their daily practice in the classroom. (more…)
Blog post by Helen Aberdeen, Director of the Document Summary Service & Bristol Guide, School of Education, University of Bristol.
Now we are well into 2020 and spring is in our sights, it is a good time not just to look forward, but also to take stock of the year which has gone.
One of the things which I like to do as Director of the Document Summary Service here at the University of Bristol is to take a look at the ‘Top ten’ – i.e. the summaries which had the most downloads from our subscribers over the last year. If you are a subscriber, it may be interesting to see if your interests align with those of the subscriber community as a whole. If you are not yet a subscriber, I hope that this overview will give you a flavour of the wide-ranging scope of the summaries and tempt you to join us in 2020. (more…)
Blog post by Professor George Leckie, Dr Lucy Prior, and Professor Harvey Goldstein, School of Education, University of Bristol
The Conservatives and Labour hold different views on the future of England’s system of school accountability by Progress 8. However, both parties’ thinking is at odds with the research evidence.
Over the last 30 years, successive governments have held secondary schools to account for their GCSE results via national school performance tables (for a review see Leckie & Goldstein, 2017). In 2016 the Conservatives replaced their longstanding ‘5A*–C’ school performance measure – the percentage of pupils with five or more GCSEs at grade C or higher – with Progress 8, a ‘value-added’ measure of the average pupil progress made between key stage 2 SATs and GCSE. This long-argued-for shift in measuring school performance reflects the fact that simple school differences in GCSE results say more about differences in the types of pupil taught in different schools than differences in the effectiveness of the education provided by those schools. (more…)