British Educational Research Journal最新文献

This paper uses examples from Australia and England to explore subject English with regard to the multiple metaphors inherent in the terms ‘settling’ and ‘unsettling’. In doing so we are concerned with imagining a future for a subject English curriculum which dislodges it from its imperial, colonial roots. In the first instance, we outline the existing approaches to unsettling English in England and Australia and the challenges and limitations of these approaches and strategies. We also discuss some of the structures and agents which are invested in maintaining the status quo: namely, curriculum and assessment; teacher practices and disciplinary norms; teacher knowledge and CPD; and student context and the purposes of English. We conclude with the implications for a systemic and multi-layered approach to unsettling. We see this as an opening up of a comparative conversation about subject English across the Anglophone world, the different contexts of unsettling and what that subject might look like if it is to enact the justice imperatives of education in the twenty-first century.

Children continue to comprise a significant portion of refugees and migrants worldwide and may be impacted by challenges or trauma prior to or during their journey, or after arrival in the host country. School serves as a constant place in the lives of many of these newly arrived children, and a potential setting for wellbeing support. However, there is a gap in understanding how young newcomers are supported at school and by whom; this is especially unclear in an education system like England's, which has a default policy of directly mainstreaming non-English-speaking students, which many young newcomers are. We interviewed 29 school staff members at eight secondary schools to gather their perspectives on who provides wellbeing support to young newcomers and the nature of such support. Using thematic analysis, we found that the majority of wellbeing support for young newcomers is performed by English as an additional language (EAL) staff and that the main form of support provided is through individualised relationship building, which in turn mutually fosters other types of support. Using Gholami's framework of moral care and caring pedagogy as central to teachers' praxis, we discuss how care is at the core of EAL staff actions in supporting newcomer wellbeing and how these staff members at times prioritise care over learning. Our findings have important implications for both school staff and newcomer students, for which we provide several recommendations.

School exclusion forms part of the processes that can increase young people's risk of offending and involvement in exploitation and harm. However, little is known about the education experiences of young people impacted by harm, such as child sexual and criminal exploitation. This paper presents findings from a survey with 17 children's and families' social care departments in England and Wales to understand the education experiences of children open to social care for extra-familial harm. The research was undertaken at a time of significant pressure on schools and teachers to improve academic performance. The findings evidence that 45% of young people were in mainstream settings, 85% of young people had experienced some form of exclusion and this differed across gender, disability and ethnicity. Finally, the reasons for exclusion were strongly associated with young people's experiences of exploitation and harm. Two theories of containment are used to understand school exclusion: psychosocial and geopolitical. I argue that exclusionary school practices spatially contain the perceived ‘threat’ young people impacted by extra-familial harm pose to wider school populations, to emotionally contain professional anxieties about exploitation and violence, in the absence of appropriate educational and safeguarding system responses.

Constructing personalised and effective online language learning models based on individual personality differences is crucial in the field of education. However, there is little research on how to apply these models to students in science and engineering who have varying personality profiles. This study aimed to assess the validity of the Online Language Learners' Characteristics Model Questionnaire and investigate how its structure and performance differ among individuals with different personality traits. A total of 1015 college students completed a pen-and-paper questionnaire in online classes. The results showed that online characteristics were explained by a five-factor model consisting of language learning strategy, attitude, motivation, causal attribution, and self-efficacy. A latent profile analysis was conducted to identify four distinct personality profiles. Measurement invariance and differences in characteristics among the four personality types were examined. Our findings offer initial evidence of the specific connections between personality traits and online language learning characteristics at the individual level.

Educational inequality and mathematics achievement have been long-term concerns in England. However, most studies of inequalities focus on achievement across multiple-subjects, and studies of mathematics achievement gaps tend to look at a single test in a single year. This study provides an overview of mathematics achievement gaps in the last 13 years. Aggregate data for nearly 13 million pupils for Key Stages 1, 2, 4 and 5 are used to explore the achievement gaps by gender, Free School Meal (FSM) eligibility and ethnicity. The Common Language Effect Size is used as a measure of relative achievement for the different groups. The findings show virtually equal overall achievement in mathematics between boys and girls, but boys achieve more highest and lowest grades. In contrast, the gap for FSM eligible pupils is immense: at KS4 the average FSM pupil achieves lower grades than 66% of other pupils. Ethnicity achievement gaps show a generally consistent order, with Chinese achieving the highest average grades and Gypsy/Roma achieving the lowest. The gaps for ethnicity expand as pupils progress through their schooling. All achievement gaps have fundamentally remained constant over time, with the exception of a few ethnic groups whose relative achievement has increased. Overall, this study hopefully provides a reference point for future research that explores causes and ways to reduce the identified achievement inequalities.

This qualitative case study explores teachers' epistemic agency during the implementation of interdisciplinary pedagogy in an Israeli high school. We examined science teachers collaborating on curriculum design through observations of weekly meetings. Micro-analysis of a pivotal meeting uncovered conditions shaping teachers' epistemic agency. Our findings reveal two central themes: ‘fragile knowledge’ and ‘forward motion’, illustrating how teachers navigate uncertainty and construct new knowledge. We introduce a novel framework for understanding epistemic agency development, comprising four key elements: epistemic disruption, interaction, autonomy and epistemic stance. This framework provides a lens for analysing and fostering teachers' epistemic agency, with implications for teacher development in interdisciplinary contexts.

Sense of belonging entails students' comfort level in the classroom and experienced faculty and peer support. A diminished sense of belonging can hamper academic performance. Therefore, it is important to know which student groups may experience weaker belonging and whether these disparities extend to students' authenticity, or perception they can be true to themselves. This survey research examines student differences in sense of belonging and authenticity by gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, disabilities, extracurricular involvement, parental education, prior education, study year and school. We also examined whether belonging and authenticity were related to students' self-reported academic performance. Our sample (N = 4473) consisted of Dutch undergraduate and graduate students. Data analysis employing structural equation modelling showed that male students felt more comfortable in the classroom and students with disabilities experienced less sense of belonging and authenticity than their peers. Extracurricular involvement enhanced students' belonging and authenticity. Being part of multiple minority groups impaired aspects of students' belonging and authenticity. Sense of belonging and the experienced room for authenticity positively and independently predicted academic performance. We conclude that fostering both belonging and authenticity is crucial for all students, but especially for minority students. We suggest educators foster students' sense of belonging and authenticity, which can enhance academic performance and promote educational equality and opportunities for all students. Stimulating extracurricular involvement or others forms of non-academic participation is promising to contribute to this goal.

This study provides a comparative assessment of the capabilities of leading artificial intelligence (AI) tools and human participants in a business management education context. Specifically, we (a) assess how well current language models perform in providing answers to standardised essay-type assessments in a business and management education context, (b) examine the efficacy of emergent tools in detecting AI-generated texts and (c) evaluate online AI rewriting and paraphrasing tools and their efficacy in evading detection. Using an exploratory qualitative design, this study generated and evaluated 15 standard essays using ChatGPT (n = 5), Bard (n = 5) and human (n = 5). A comparison is provided between the average performance of AI-derived essays and that of ChatGPT-generated essays across all five essays. The results suggest that AI-generated content can achieve reasonably high marks in management and business assessments. According to the findings of the study, AI's performance is highly influenced by the types of prompts used, the user's experience and the degree to which the user can discern between relevant and irrelevant content. According to the findings, Turnitin's AI detection tool is highly effective at detecting content that has been created by AI, but the effectiveness is reduced by rewriters. The Turnitin AI detection tool, however, is significantly more effective at identifying content generated by Bard compared with content generated by ChatGPT. According to the results, ChatGPT produced better results when the user provided a clear context, outlined the topic and expectations, divided the assessment tasks into sections and fed the prompts in a conversational manner to train the model. By utilising AI chatbots effectively, traditional teaching and assessment methods can be supplemented with targeted and engaging learning experiences.

Educational inequalities persist between students of low socioeconomic status and their more affluent peers. At the same time, there is evidence of positive relations between student engagement and achievement. This multiple case study investigates a national project aimed at increasing student engagement and achievement through post-Covid-19 support focused on disadvantaged schools in the Czech Republic. School staff perceived poor attendance, low student motivation and discipline problems as the most challenging issues to be addressed through project support measures. Attendance problems are tackled mainly through experiential activities; motivation and discipline problems are usually addressed by personnel positions. We argue that the selected measures aimed predominantly to support student emotional and behavioural engagement; strategies to enhance cognitive engagement and student achievement were sidelined. Paradoxically, student engagement may become a goal in itself rather than being inscribed into learning outcomes. Implications for programme support and school improvement research are suggested.

Early education provision in the state-maintained sector has historically played an important role in ensuring equitable access to high-quality early education in England. These settings have higher qualification requirements than other providers, and as they have been concentrated in areas of higher disadvantage, children from lower income households have been more likely to attend them. This paper shows that this phenomenon is changing: children from lower income households are considerably less likely to attend maintained settings than they were in 2010. Their higher likelihood compared with other children is also declining, while the share attending private nursery settings has increased sharply. Using the National Pupil Database, the paper explores the reasons why, identifying three main factors: a general decline in maintained provision across the country, probably linked to changes in national funding practices; changes in the geography of poverty; and the extension of free early education places to disadvantaged 2-year-olds, which inadvertently led to children entering and remaining in lower quality settings. The paper illustrates the inherent trade-off policymakers face between expanding early childhood education and care provision and maintaining the quality necessary for services to function as social investment. It contributes both to early childhood education and care policy studies in England and to the wider international literature on mixed economy approaches to early childhood education and care.