Music played little part in the education of British children before 1853 when Edward Thring was appointed headmaster of Uppingham Grammar School in the English Midlands. Thring created an innovative holistic curriculum for the two dozen boys of this rural boarding school and he appointed a musician as the third addition to his staff to form a…

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…

Hierarchical control of skilled performance depends on chunking of several lower-level units into a single higher-level unit. The present study examined the relationship between chunking and recognition of trained materials in the context of typewriting. In 3 experiments, participants were trained with typing nonwords and were later tested on…

This article provides the final report on a research project that investigated the ways in which curriculum innovation can be led successfully in primary schools. Data gathering included 40 semi-structured interviews in 10 successful primary schools in England of varying sizes and types and in a range of geographical and social locations. Findings…

Statistics and Research Methods modules are often unpopular with psychology students; however, at Oxford Brookes University the seminar component of the second-year research methods module tends to get very positive feedback. Over half of the seminars work towards the submission of a research-based experimental lab report. This article introduces…

Innovation is essential for the education sector. The ways in which curriculum decision making is organised reflects different implicit approaches on how educational systems pertain to promote innovation in education. Curriculum holds an outstanding place when seeking to promote innovation in education, as it reflects the vision for education by…

In 1963, the University of Sussex inaugurated an innovative Early Leavers Scheme in response to two government reports which confirmed that it was still the norm for talented working-class children to leave school aged 15 or 16 and indicated that the hopes of the 1944 Education Act were as yet unfulfilled. This article explores what the scheme has…

This paper contributes to the special issue by offering a new framework in time periods that demonstrates the changing nature of the intellectual transfer to and from colonial India and to posit the imperatives that drove these changes. It shows that the nature of educational exchange in India was transformed in elemental ways during the colonial…

This article feeds into debate about the feasibility and usefulness of educational experiments by discussing methodological issues arising out of a study which sought causal links between teaching and learning of one aspect of French as a foreign language. The study involved two small-scale experiments which tested a hypothesis regarding the…

Educational selection methods are not infallible. A considerable reservoir of unexploited intellectual ability remains in the working class. (Author)

Reports on the Harewood Centre which has its origins in the West Riding experiment of seconding teachers to become educational social workers. (Editor/RK)

Prefaced by an interpretation of American preschool studies, a semihistorical approach is used in presenting findings from preschool experiments from the West Riding Educational Priority Area project in England, with a purpose being to suggest some alternatives and to sketch a framework for explaining the conflicting results. (ND)

Changes in the British education system are discussed and the weaknesses of the British and American systems are seen to result from common causes. These causes are described as the hours spent watching television, children conditioned to expect entertainment, and educational experiments including open classrooms and "new math."…