Educators are concerned that children make progress in their learning. While there are both policy and professional debates about how progress should be monitored and assessed, the views of children are rarely considered. Grounded in the 'voiced' research tradition, this paper reports on 158 focus group interviews with upper primary school…

Background: Help-seeking research has traditionally inferred behavioural responses to the need for help from post-hoc reflections and experiments outside of the classroom context. Aim: We aimed to gain an ecologically valid understanding of the help-seeking process by examining the association between pupils' task-specific perceptions and their…

This paper presents findings from a study into children's media and information literacy (MIL). The purpose of the study was to understand English primary school children's (ages 8-11) attitude toward the internet as well as their ability to find, use and evaluate information. This then informed the development of a MIL programme of learning for…

Gender balance in computing education is a decades-old issue that has been the focus of much previous research. In K-12, the introduction of mandatory computing education goes some way to giving all learners the opportunity to engage with computing throughout school, but a gender imbalance still persists when computer science becomes an elective…

In order to expand previous intraindividual studies of student engagement we investigated students' observed engagement (i.e., on- and off-task behaviour), instructional activities (i.e., teacher-led whole class, individual work, pair-work, student-teacher interaction, assessment, and "other"), and self-reported learning experiences…

The study uses data from five assessment points for reading and maths. It focuses on a constant sample of students, all of whom completed a Rising Stars assessment in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also administered three teacher surveys: the first focused on the initial period of lockdown, the second focused on the autumn 2020…

Omitted prior achievement bias is pervasive in international assessment studies and precludes causal inference. For example, reported negative associations between student-oriented teaching strategies and student performance are against expectations and might actually reflect omitted prior achievement bias. Namely, that these teaching strategies…

Women's underrepresentation in mathematics-related careers continues to concern policymakers, economists, and educators. This study addressed the issue by examining data from two international databases, namely IEA's "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2015," and the World Economic Forum's "Global Gender Gap…

This study investigated the systematic and principled teaching of foreign language (FL) literacy in two young learner classrooms in England. Over the course of 23 weeks, two classes of 9-11 year olds (N = 45) learned spoken and written language through an integrated pedagogy. The underpinning rationale was to explore principled ways of teaching FL…

The role of phonics instruction in early reading development has been the subject of significant conjecture. Recently, England implemented a phonics screening check to assess the phonetic decoding of 6-year-old students, to ensure that all students master this foundational literacy skill and attain adequate phonemic awareness in the early years of…

Background: Recent effectiveness studies have investigated the relationship between two dimensions of effectiveness -- namely, quality and equity. Specifically, the question of whether effective schools can also reduce the initial differences in student outcomes attributed to student background factors has been examined. In this context, the…

Although science is a core subject, educators at Uphall Primary School have found in recent times pupils do not display the same enthusiasm for science as they do for other subjects. In order to raise the pupils' science capital and generate an eagerness among the pupils to experiment, learn and develop their curiosity about the world around them,…

In order to advance our understanding of educational processes, we present a tutorial of intraindividual variability. An adaptive educational process is characterised by stable (less variability), and a maladaptive process is characterised by instable (more variability) learning experiences from one learning situation to the next. We outline step…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

This study investigated perceptions that children aged 6-10 years (n = 83) have of what it means to be physically active. Ideographic research was conducted utilising drawings and interviews to understand values that are placed on participating in physical activity (PA). The article questions the idea that whilst it may be commonly accepted by…