Blog
Research on multiple choice questions
Posted on October 30, 2013
Since my last posts on multiple choice questions (here and here), Kris Boulton and Joe Kirby have pointed me in the direction of Robert Bjork’s work on remembering and forgetting. Here’s an extract fr…
Siri and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
Posted on October 27, 2013
A couple of months ago my mother bought her first iPhone. I was showing her how various bits and pieces on it worked, and I thought I’d show her how Siri worked. Much as I love the iPhone, I tend to t…
False dichotomies, begging the question and the knowledge-skills debate
Posted on October 23, 2013
For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A lot of the time, I hear people say that the tired old ‘knowledge-skills’ debate is a false dichotomy…
Tristram Hunt and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Posted on October 20, 2013
As well as being the new Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Tristram Hunt is also the author of an excellent introduction to Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropis…
Teaching content-rich lessons
Posted on October 16, 2013
I recently read this in a blog post by Doug Lemov. One of the challenges of Hirsch or Christodoulou if you’re a teacher is that many of the requisite actions–a curriculum that prizes and emphasizes kn…
Multiple choice questions, part two
Posted on October 13, 2013
In my previous blog post I gave an example of what I thought was an excellent multiple choice question, taken from the British Columbia leaving exam. It’s as follows: 15. How did the Soviet totalitari…
Closed questions and higher order thinking
Posted on October 6, 2013
I know that Andrew Old often writes about the way that open questions are often, wrongly, seen as superior to closed questions – ie, it’s seen as being better to ask pupils questions that have lengthy…
When are pupils cognitively ready to learn?
Posted on September 27, 2013
A couple of weeks ago there was a controversy about when pupils should start school. A group of academics sent a letter to the Telegraph arguing that ‘an ever-earlier start to formal learning’ could o…
Research Ed 2013 – How can we discover the root causes of successful teaching and learning?
Posted on September 8, 2013
The title of my speech was ‘Statistical significance and theoretical frameworks: how can we discover the root causes of successful teaching and learning?’, which is a bit of a mouthful, I know. Here’s…