The terms 'feedback' and 'formative assessment' are ubiquitous in education, but their conceptual boundaries are ill-defined. This perspective piece explores the meaning of 'feedback' and 'formative assessment', revealing the entanglement and confusion that exists between these two terms. An argument for clarity of terms is made, to avoid…

It has been widely accepted in the science education research community that scientific literacy as a concept and phrase was introduced by Paul deHart Hurd in 1958. Recent research into the origins of the phrase, however, has shown this to be incorrect. Its first published use can be traced back, in fact, to 1945, and the phrase was frequently…

Education research has recently seen the emergence of two distinct frameworks guiding the application of quantitative methods through a more critical and equity-oriented lens. These two frameworks are critical quantitative (CritQuant) studies and quantitative critical race theory (QuantCrit). Although different in their intellectual traditions,…

What do we mean by the word "education"? How do others know what we mean when the term is under constant revision? Do we even need definitive answers in order to speak meaningfully of it? This paper attempts to explore the potential for education's meaningfulness via attention to its ordinary usages. In order to justify the need to be…

In this invited Viewpoint on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the journal "Language Testing," I argue that at the core of future challenges and opportunities for the field--both in scholarly and operational respects--remain basic questions and principles in language testing and assessment. Despite the high levels of sophistication…

There has been a policy push in K-12 educational settings towards personalized learning in the last decade. Commercial platforms and learning designers have responded, offering learning tools to support teaching and learning through data-driven insights and recommendations. Trending towards the augmentation or replacing human teachers with…

The focus of this paper is learning the language of data science and statistics through the use of simple classroom activities. Many terms in statistics are known to be lexically ambiguous, having one meaning in general English conversation and another, more technical, meaning in statistical English. The main aim is to investigate whether the…

The 19th century saw the rise of mass schooling. School acts were published, increasing number of teachers were trained and hired, and children increasingly attended schools. This development was strongest in Europe and North America, with schooling in the USA, France and Prussia leading the way. While this development with its national and…

The Impact Agenda, introduced with Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF), constituted a revolution in research evaluation in the UK. 'Research impact' (impact of scholarly work outside of academia) became one of three profiles under which research quality is evaluated. This shift in the British evaluation system was followed, and often…

Approaches to Learning (AtL) is an umbrella construct describing children's attitudes, habits, and learning styles as they engage in learning. First introduced by the National Education Goals Panel to indicate a child's readiness to learn in school, AtL includes openness to new tasks, initiative, task persistence, and imagination. Over the years,…

This essay offers six reasons why the field of gifted education should retire the terms giftedness and gifted. Additionally, in the historical context of longstanding, severe, and pervasive racial and income inequities in the field of gifted education, the term Master's Discourse is introduced and defined in this call to change terminology. Among…

This article draws attention to the keyword "New Historicism" through its evolution from its antecedent "Historicism." Using the OED definition of both as a starting point, this article explains the development of New Historicism as an interpretive strategy in the study of history and literature. In keeping with the…

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…

"Academic language" is a term that is thrown around frequently in educational circles, particularly in recent years. As a part of a larger study investigating trends in practitioners' efficacy in teaching, using, and supporting academic language in classrooms, the authors honed in on teachers' definitions and corresponding understandings…

This article draws attention to the keyword "global citizenship" through an analysis of the ambiguity of expectations of teachers from the Ontario curriculum documents. Particular reference is drawn to the citizenship education framework, an addition to the 2013 revision of "Ontario Curriculum: Social Studies, Grades 1 to 6;…