The British Educational Research Association (BERA) has promulgated a concept of close-to-practice research that is seen as vital to defending and promoting education as an academic discipline. However, what is overlooked are the questions of what education is for and what educational practice is--questions that need to be addressed for any…

A growing evidence base has demonstrated the value of Forest School as an outdoor learning approach which supports a range of benefits including improved physical, social and mental wellbeing, increased confidence and self-esteem and the development of problem-solving skills. However, critics of Forest School have argued that a lack of theoretical…

A critical aim of teacher quality research is to identify and distil its multiple components. While many such components have been identified in the literature, there is a scarcity of research that has attempted to empirically investigate how these elements integrate within a larger profile of teacher quality, including how particular teachers'…

Holocaust education, which refers to the teaching and learning of the Holocaust--the systematic genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II--is an essential component of history and social studies education in many countries. Its primary aim is to raise awareness of the Holocaust, promote understanding of…

A growing body of literature suggests that 'intercultural education' is an important tool for transformative learning about oneself and the other. Yet little is known about the challenges and opportunities of intercultural education in practice, particularly in light of an increasing focus in Western education policy on testing and…

Mastering spelling is important for children to progress in writing. The National Curriculum in England details spelling lists linked to each year group in primary education. Assessment practices also emphasise the importance of teaching spelling. However, to date, little is known about how teachers feel about teaching spelling nor the…

Although fostering values is promoted within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) and a shift in values is seen as essential for a sustainable future, recent international findings indicate that this aspect of ESE is being neglected. Previous research has shown there to be common ground between ESE and the field of character education…

The present study ascertains the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and students' science self-efficacy using data involving 509,182 15-year-old students and 17,678 school principals in 69 countries/regions who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. Hierarchical linear modelling results show…

Should teachers have complete autonomy over teaching methods and practices, or should some aspects of their practice be determined by school or government policy? We address this question using repeated (value-added) maths test scores linked to rich survey data from the TALIS video study. With the possible exception of inexperienced teachers, we…

This article discusses the results of a qualitative study examining the ways civil society organisations (CSOs) may better support grass-roots initiatives for everyday peacebuilding via education in conflict-affected societies, where official state processes have failed. Our research is set in the Cyprus context, where the conflict between the…

Drawing on descriptions of research-into-practice initiatives, this article presents a new framework to aid understanding of how research findings influence educational practice at scale. The framework focuses upon five areas: trustworthiness of the findings and generalisability; implications and instructions for practice; support for…

In Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most fundamental political and moral issue current and future citizens face. If we accept the maxim that schools should prepare citizens for participation in determining the future of their state, Israeli students must be introduced to the historical, political and moral questions at the heart of…

Research has identified that creative arts education in homeschooling contexts presents unique challenges. A range of factors contribute to this, including a dearth of home-education-specific support. As such, the development of supporting resources that target the unique needs and approaches of homeschooling parents has previously been…

Children who enter school not yet reading need some systematic phonics to get them started, but cannot be expected to cope with the whole alphabet or more than a subset of phoneme-grapheme correspondences and grapheme-phoneme correspondences at that stage. So phonics schemes necessarily adopt some sequence for the introduction of graphemes and…

Silence infuses all aspects of our daily communications: what we say and what remains unspoken; those to whom we speak, and those we ignore; those we trust and respect, and those we do not. In the school environment, interactions between students and teachers lie at the heart of pedagogy. This relationship is also marked by its silences, and the…