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<\/a><\/p>\nResearchED<\/a>\u00a0is getting big. A ‘grassroots movement’ started by a former teacher, it aims to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. Since I\u2019m researching how simple, well-timed social psychological interventions can help kids from low-income families thrive at school, I went along to their London event last September see what it was all about. That is, me and an awful lot of other\u00a0delegates. On a Saturday. Standing room only.\u00a0<\/p>\n There were some well-known names, but the main draw was the hundred-or-so school practitioners, educational policymakers and academics\u00a0who presented parallel sessions in seven slots throughout the day.<\/p>\n The impressive Eleanor Stringer and\u00a0Elena Rosa Brown of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) was my first slot. The EEF has some chunky money to commission research into improving outcomes for kids from low-income families, and I took away two pieces of good news. Firstly, they\u2019ve recently begun to expand their focus to cover well-being and non-cognitive skills as well as their original aim of increasing educational attainment. I think this is good news for everyone, and of special interest to me as\u00a0one of my areas of research is looking at how non-cognitive skills can drive not only educational attainment but also employability. Secondly, they told us that a new focus for them is packaging academic research in ways that are of practical use in schools using\u00a0guidance reports<\/a>. They’re aware that this is a big challenge and\u00a0it\u2019s very positive that they\u2019re starting on the\u00a0journey.<\/p>\n Three\u00a0other slots were highlights for me.<\/p>\n Firstly, Stephen Gorard of the University of Durham gave some shocking examples of poor education research that had somehow found their\u00a0way into peer-reviewed journals. While he offered\u00a0a handy guide to sifting the solid from the flaky, the talk underlined the need for trusted intermediaries between research and practice – organisations like the EEF and TES.<\/p>\n Secondly, Carl Hendrick and Robin MacPherson from Wellington College highlighted practical evidence-based ideas for effective teaching: Barak Rosenshine’s\u00a0principles of instruction<\/a>\u00a0and Robert Bjork’s\u00a0desirable difficulties<\/a>\u00a0were the standouts for me that I need to look into. The\u00a0emphasis, in this talk and more generally in the conference, was on the cognitive side (dual coding,\u00a0cognitive load etc.), and I see opportunities for social psychology to get more of a profile in future conferences.<\/p>\n Finally, Robin Launder worked the audience like a pro with Theo Wubbels’ research<\/a> into\u00a0teacher-student relationships, ending on a high with a video of Ian Wright<\/a>\u00a0meeting\u00a0an\u00a0inspirational teacher from his schooldays. Eyes welled, mine included.<\/p>\n ResearchED might not be widely known, but it seems\u00a0to me that it’s generating valuable debate in two of education’s big challenges:\u00a0how can practitioners and policymakers identify high quality relevant research, and how can they then apply it to\u00a0classroom practice?\u00a0These are tough questions, and ones\u00a0to which our team here at Sussex is focused on making a contribution within our field of social psychology.<\/p>\n To finish, a nice\u00a0practical tip. According to Carl Hendrick, one teacher asked Dylan Wiliam about his\u00a0advice that\u00a0feedback should be more work for the receiver than for the giver. “How does that work in practice with maths homework?”\u00a0Wiliam’s answer: don’t mark what’s right and what’s wrong, instead tell the student how many answers are wrong and ask them to figure out which ones.<\/p>\n Now that sounds like a great recipe for\u00a0developing high-quality researchers for the next generation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ian Hadden is a doctoral researcher looking at how simple, well-timed social psychological interventions can help school students from low-income families see school as a place where they belong and can thrive. The interventions aim to help students reframe everyday experiences as normal, rather than evidence that \u201ckids like me\u201d don\u2019t belong in school<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Ian Hadden ResearchED\u00a0is getting big. A ‘grassroots movement’ started by a former teacher, it aims to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. Since I\u2019m researching how simple, well-timed social psychological interventions can help kids from low-income…<\/span><\/p>\n