In the name of curriculum breadth and raising standards, recent government policy in England has removed a large number of non-academic qualifications from the list of those that secondary schools can count in league tables, discouraging their use. Most of these were vocational qualifications, but they also include skills-led qualifications. This…

Missing data is endemic in much educational research. However, practices such as step-wise regression common in the educational research literature have been shown to be dangerous when significant data are missing, and multiple imputation (MI) is generally recommended by statisticians. In this paper, we provide a review of these advances and their…

Academic boredom usually contributes adversely towards student engagement and performance across a diverse range of settings including universities. The formal study of academic boredom in higher education remains, however, a relatively underdeveloped field and one surprisingly neglected in the UK. Rooted in Control-Value Theory, details of a…

In recent years, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods in the same study has become increasingly acceptable in both applied and academic psychological research. However, a difficulty for many mixed methods researchers is how to integrate findings consistently. The value of using a coherent framework throughout the research…

The article reports on an empirical study into underachievement of 14-year-old students in four English schools by drawing upon learning power theory and practice. The study examined the characteristic learning power profiles of underachieving and overachieving adolescents, and then used student learning profiles diagnostically to support the…

This paper reports on a national study, involving a mixed-method research design comprising a randomised controlled trial (RCT), text analysis, student and teacher interviews and lesson observations. It set out to investigate whether contextualised teaching of grammar, linked to the teaching of writing, would improve student outcomes in writing…