In September 2010 the Wellcome Trust published a detailed report which, for the first time, gave an in-depth analysis of the learning experiences of children in England and Wales as they prepare for science assessment at the end of their primary education (key stage 2), and the children's ideas about how the experience might be improved. The…

It is important to recognise and capture the rich and complex knowledge, understanding and experience that comes with the day-to-day interactions of those immersed in the school and science classroom environment, so that policy-makers do not overlook those who practice in the classroom and theorists do not assign incorrect meaning to the actions…

National tests, public examinations, and vocational qualifications in England are used for a variety of purposes, including the certification of individual learners in different subject areas and the accountability of individual professionals and institutions. However, there has been ongoing debate about the reliability and validity of their…

The effector dependence of automatic imitation was investigated using a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) procedure during which participants were required to make an open or closed response with their hand or their mouth. The correct response for each trial was indicated by a pair of letters in Experiments 1 and 2 and by a colored square in…

The drive to raise standards in core curriculum subjects, and the teaching of thinking skills, are both aspects of the UK government's education policy for England. This article is based on findings from a questionnaire-based research project which investigated the relationship between National Curriculum tests, which are an important element of…

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional…

Visual word identification requires readers to code the identity and order of the letters in a word and match this code against previously learned codes. Current models of this lexical matching process posit context-specific letter codes in which letter representations are tied to either specific serial positions or specific local contexts (e.g.,…

This article is primarily methodological but has dual aims. First, it makes a case for Q methodology as an effective and so far little exploited means of capturing, comparing and contrasting individual perspectives on a specific question in the field of educational leadership. In common with other research approaches designed to uncover the…

This paper emerges from an evaluation conducted by the author into the impact of a community-based intervention scheme designed to reduce perceived levels of "anti-social behaviour" amongst young people living in deprived communities. Drawing from this evaluation, the paper discusses the difficulties in assessing quantifiable measures of…

This article describes practitioner research which shows how self-assessment as a form of assessment for learning can be aligned with all the educational goals of religious education in England, notably the self-assessment of attitudes and values, such as tolerance and respect. The background literature on assessment for learning is described, as…

Service supervision has become a central feature of the training of child psychotherapists in the UK. This paper reports on the work of a research workshop set up to explore the task and its complexities. The paper draws on several years of monthly meetings of a highly experienced group of supervisors. It discusses the methodology for studying…

Background: In line with the increase of using value-added assessment information to evaluate learning gain made by learners in different parts of the world, the Education Bureau in Hong Kong has recently introduced a system that provides value-added information of secondary school students. However, not many teachers have a clear knowledge and…

Achieve, through support from the Noyce Foundation, examined ten sets of international standards with the intent of informing the development of both the conceptual framework and new U.S. science standards. Achieve selected countries based on their strong performance on international assessments and/or their economic, political, or cultural…

The determinants of sentencing are of much interest in criminal justice and legal research. Understanding the determinants of sentencing decisions is important for ensuring transparent, consistent, and justifiable sentencing practice that adheres to the goals of sentencing, such as the punishment, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation of…

A collaborative curriculum development project was set up to address the lack of good examples of teaching about ideas and evidence and the nature of science encountered by student teachers training to teach in the age range 11-16 in schools in England. Student and teacher-mentor pairs devised, taught and evaluated novel lessons and approaches.…