Our research constructed school life histories with 23 'lower-attaining' primary school children in England. Previous research has often failed to focus on the social justice aspects of this group, and no attempt has been made to contextualise children's misrecognition experiences within their full school life history, nor to hear primarily from…

The importance of children is a universally accepted concept in schools. However, do we actually listen to what children have to say? Rudduck and Fielding [2002. "The transformative potential of student voice: Confronting the power issues." Paper presented at BERA Annual Conference, University of Exeter, p. 2] argue that the voices of…

There is an extensive international literature on different forms of ability grouping in schools, much of which describes their impact on students' academic achievement, motivation, self-concept and/or attitudes towards learning. Comparatively little research has focused on students' perspectives of these practices, while the research that has…

Compliance to government-prescribed national 'school-readiness' performance measures, particularly in early numeracy and literacy, readies and governs early years children for primary schools' test-based culture. Performance measures, such as the Early Learning Goals and the Phonics Screening Check, govern and steer early years teachers towards…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between speechreading ability, phonological skills, and word reading ability in typically developing children. Method: Sixty-six typically developing children (6-7 years old) completed tasks measuring word reading, speechreading (words, sentences, and short stories),…

Multilingualism is highly prevalent in schools around the world. Yet, the relationship between multilingualism and academic attainment is not well understood. Where research on this topic exists, it has predominantly focused on how home language background impacts on academic success, lacking in a broader view of multilingualism which extends…

We examined the role of visuo-spatial working memory in different types of arithmetic ability in children. Previous research had suggested that arithmetic is not a single entity (Dowker, 2005, 2015), and also that visuo-spatial working memory is specifically involved in mathematical cognition (McKenzie et al., 2003) There has, however, been little…

A robust finding in cognitive psychology is that training children's spatial abilities is an effective route to improving mathematics performance. Despite this finding, there is limited representation of spatial reasoning in school curricula. To bridge this gap between research and practice, we created the Spatial Reasoning Toolkit (SRT; Gifford…

We examine the long-standing claim that understanding relational correspondence is a general component of representational understanding. Two experiments with 175 preschool children located in Norwich, United Kingdom, examined the use of a scale model comparing performances on a "copy" task, measuring abstract spatial arrangement…

Concerns have been raised about genomic studies of autism. Most recently, the Spectrum 10 K study was paused due to criticism from the autistic community. This situation raised important questions about how the autistic and autism communities perceive genomic research. The Personal Experiences of Autism and Perceptions of DNA-based-research study…

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how…

A recent meta-synthesis study with a sample of >12 million participants revealed that the male advantage in mental rotation (MR) is the largest cognitive sex/gender difference found in psychological literature. MR requires test takers to mentally rotate three-dimensional cubic figures under time restrictions. Previous studies have investigated…

Within the wealth of research on 'ability' in education, there is a missing perspective: the perspective of the child. Whilst 'ability' informed practices such as 'ability' grouping are commonplace in the UK, how these are experienced by the young child has previously received only limited attention in research. Using case study evidence, this…

Why do inequalities in schooling persist, even in relatively egalitarian school systems? This article examines within school sorting as an explanation. We use classroom data on friendship networks in 480 European secondary schools and contrast comprehensive (England, Sweden) and tracked systems (Germany, Netherlands). Our question is to what…

The aim of this research was to develop a new observation-based measure for assessing caregivers' mind-mindedness in the preschool years and investigate whether this measure could explain the link between mothers' early appropriate mind-related comments and children's later mentalizing abilities. The new measure was developed using a sample of…