Primary language delay remains one of the most prevalent developmental delays in early childhood, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Previous research has established language difficulties and social disadvantage being particular risk factors for adverse outcomes later in life. To help prevent low educational achievement and poorer outcomes,…

The present study examines the effects that a 3-week study-abroad (SA) experience and a set of individual differences have on the foreign language (FL) development of a group of 64 Catalan/Spanish speakers, learners of English as an FL. Moreover, the present study attempts to account for the outcome differences between successful and less…

This study evaluated the impact and acceptability of a three-hour bespoke training workshop for sports coaches and teachers to subsequently deliver a sport-for-health smoking prevention intervention in primary schools. Questionnaires were completed pre- and post-training by both teachers (N = 24) and coaches (N = 8), and post-intervention by…

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children's use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking…

Supporting pupils with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in mainstream schools is a challenging task. This article proposes a professional development framework for educational psychologists (EPs) to consider when supporting the development of specialist ASD staff. The framework focuses on training content, educator characteristics and organisational…

Children with good and poor listening comprehension (n = 17 in each group) 9-10 years of age were trained to self-generate mental images for sentences and stories. Their ability to identify the antecedents of personal pronouns in individual sentences and also to select the appropriate pronoun in a story cloze task was assessed pre- and…

The connective approach is developed by Sir Peter Strawson, emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University, as an effective way to understand the fundamental structure of human thinking in the field of analytical philosophy. This article provides insights for extending the work of Strawson, Tay, and Tay et al. to education, in particular,…

Research suggests motivational interviewing (MI) techniques can be useful in educational settings for improving motivation in disaffected pupils. This exploratory mixed methods study sought to investigate whether implementing an MI-based programme through school-based paraprofessionals would be effective in improving pupil motivation. Five pupils…

This paper describes an exploratory trial conducted with 14-15 year-old students in English state schools who were studying business start-ups as part of a course in "Business Studies". The intervention uses a "Story Grammar" strategy to improve students' reasoning by increasing the frequency and complexity of their use of…

Extensive evidence exists that many children who experience early socio-economic disadvantage have delayed language development. These delays have been shown to exist when children start school and appear to persist through their education. Interventions that can help these children are desirable to ease the difficulties they have in school and to…

The Parent Academy was a series of classes for pupils' parents, designed to improve the English and mathematics attainment of pupils in Years 3 to 6 in English primary schools. Parents were offered the opportunity to participate in 12 Parent Academy classes, 6 on English and 6 on mathematics, delivered fortnightly by tutors with teaching…

This paper demonstrates the positive impact of learning through ecological fieldwork upon children's ability to write, and to write about science. Specifically we have carried out a relatively large-scale study (involving 379 children aged 9-11 years from 8 primary schools in North East England) comparing intervention classes (involved in…

This article reports on an innovative empirical research project, using a quasi-experimental trial, in which 9-11-year-olds learned about character and virtues through the exploration of four classic stories. The overall aim of the programme was to enhance virtue literacy. Virtue literacy is defined as the knowledge, understanding and application…

Background: Oral language skills are a critical foundation for literacy and more generally for educational success. The current study shows that oral language skills can be improved by providing suitable additional help to children with language difficulties in the early stages of formal education. Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled…

This report describes the development and pilot evaluation of SMART Spaces. This programme aims to boost GCSE science outcomes by applying the principle that information is more easily learnt when it is repeated multiple times, with time passing between the repetitions. This approach is known as "spaced learning" and is contrasted with a…