Standardized testing is an integral part of the English and American education systems. However, the use of high-stakes testing has unintended consequences, one of which is test anxiety. Over the last 50 years, increased attention has been directed to developing tools to identify students experiencing test anxiety. However, many test anxiety…

School inspections are a common feature of many education systems. These may be informed by quantitative background data about schools. It is recognised that there are pros and cons of using such quantitative information as part of the inspection process, though these have rarely been succinctly set out. This paper seeks to fill this gap by…

Diversity in Higher Education system has been a central topic for both scholars and policy-makers for decades. Several studies have investigated how to measure diversity and the nature of its determinants so far; however, contradictory empirical evidence has emerged. This paper contributes to this literature by adopting a methodological approach…

Comparative interrupted time series (CITS) designs evaluate impact by modeling the relative deviation from trends among a treatment and comparison group after an intervention. The broad applicability of the design means it is widely used in education research. Like all non-experimental evaluation methods however, the internal validity of a given…

This paper challenges the notion that quantitative data -- as a numeric truth -- exist independent of a nation's political and racial landscape. Utilising large-scale national attainment data, the analysis challenges the belief that 'White working class' children in England, especially boys, are 'the new oppressed' -- as a former equality adviser…

A number of studies demonstrate that quantitative teaching provides social science students with analytical and critical skills. Accordingly, the skills acquired during quantitative teaching are assumed to enhance students' progress in and after their degree. However, previous studies rely on subjective measures of students' evaluations of their…

One of the most commonly identified obstacles in the learning-teaching of quantitative material is statistics anxiety. Of the factors analysed in relation to statistics anxiety, age and gender have received a substantial proportion of the research focus. Yet there is limited work that systematically examines the possibility of an…

The quantitative strand of the Young People's Attitudes towards Religious Diversity Project, conducted by the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, set out to capture data from over 2000 students living in each of the four nations of the United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and from London as a special case.…

Developing student's confidence with qualitative research methods presents a challenge to many educators and is even more of a challenge when the 'educator' themselves are unfamiliar with such methods. This paper offers a three-way reflective account of bringing one such colleague 'into the fold'; their journey to the 'dark side.' It documents the…

A central goal of research on short-term memory (STM) over the past 2 decades has been to identify the mechanisms that underpin the representation of serial order, and to establish whether these mechanisms are the same across different modalities and domains (e.g., verbal, visual, spatial). A fruitful approach to addressing this question has…

Whilst new friendships and an active social life are commonly discussed features of 'being a student', there is limited empirical research that has quantitatively studied the contribution that social factors play in students' university experience. Research that has been conducted shows that belonging and social integration are important factors…

An anaphoric reference to the complement-set is a reference to the set that does not fulfil the predicate of the preceding sentence. Preferred reference to the complement-set has been found in eye movements when a character's implicit desire for a high amount has been denied using a negative emotion. We recorded event-related potentials to examine…

Computer simulations have been used very effectively for many years in the teaching of science but the focus has been on cognitive development. This study, however, is an investigation into the possibility that a student's experimental skills in the real-world environment can be judged via the undertaking of a suitably chosen computer simulation…

Previous research has established that readers' eye movements are sensitive to the difficulty with which a word is processed. One important factor that influences processing is the fit of a word within the wider context, including its plausibility. Here we explore the influence of plausibility in counterfactual language processing. Counterfactuals…

Persuasive arguments have been made for the existence of pedagogical discourses that invoke gender as a factor in the ascription of quality to musical compositions, and previous research has shown that some music teachers ascribe "maleness" to the characteristics that they regard as markers of high quality. Drawing upon Lucy Green's…