How many times have we heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? There’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that it is, especially for children. Eating breakfast has been shown to improve…
What makes “great teaching”? It’s a complicated question, made more difficult by trying to measure how teachers make decisions in the classroom and what impact those decisions have on what pupils learn…
Teachers give tests to find out what their students know. But tests do a lot more than that and can have a powerful effect on what a student remembers. In a typical research study looking at the links…
The more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to remember not only information about that topic, but also other unrelated information shown at the same time. A study published today in Neuron…
Thomas Andrillon, École normale supérieure (ENS) – PSL and Sid Kouider, École normale supérieure (ENS) – PSL
The idea that during sleep our minds shut down from the outside world is ancient and one that is still deeply anchored in our view of sleep today, despite some everyday life experiences and recent scientific…
A series of binary discussions has been plaguing early reading instruction for quite some time now: phonics versus whole language, reading for pleasure versus reading for learning, digital versus paper…
Adults and youngsters are willing to queue overnight to get their hands on the latest product release from Apple and children appear to be drawn to iPads because of the immediate feedback they get when…
Parents and teachers have long been given guidance on which books can help children learn but no such help is on offer when it comes to apps. The bad news is, definite recommendations may be a long time…
Be it personalised gifts, personalised cosmetics services or personalised shopping recommendations, we have become the centre of the products we use like never before. And the trend is now more and more…
Even in a world of digital devices, braille continues to be a vital part of life for blind people. For nearly 200 years, this versatile writing system has allowed them to learn, work and live in a more…
Homework is the perfect platform for parents to help children unravel the mystery to learning. Parents are in a unique position to hang the academic concepts that children learn at school onto their real-life…
Are adults superior problem solvers to children? Most people would say yes. From buttoning a jacket to operating a projector to multiplying complex numbers, our abilities exceed those of children. And…
We are often told that behaviour is not really a problem in the vast majority of English schools. In 2012, the government reported that classroom behaviour was “at least satisfactory” in 99.7% of schools…
Manu Kapur, National Institute of Education of Singapore
Learning from mistakes, errors, and failure seems intuitive and compelling. Everyone can relate to it. But if failure is a powerful learning mechanism, why do we wait for it to happen? Why can’t we design…
Michael Gove is ploughing ahead with plans to gather an elite team of computer science experts to help bring coding into schools. He has rightly acknowledged that teaching programming in schools is vital…
Deputy Associate Dean (Academic), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, School of Education, The University of Queensland