Here, intelligence is taken to mean scores from psychometric tests of cognitive functions. This essay describes how cognitive tests offer assessments of brain functioning--an otherwise difficult-to-assess organ--that have proved enduringly useful in the field of health and medicine. The two "consequential world problems" (the phrase used…

Background: Creativity is linked with educationally relevant constructs such as achievement, intelligence, and motivation. However, very few studies have explored longitudinal links between the constructs or the aetiology of individual differences in childhood creativity. Aims: The study addresses the gap in the literature of developmental studies…

The move from elite to mass systems of higher education has been accompanied by concerns relating to the quality of provision and standards, particularly in relation to the increasing proportion of higher grades awarded to students. Bayesian multilevel models were used to investigate the temporal trend of grade attainment in 101 higher education…

Students from Black Minority Ethnic (BME) groups continue to experience disadvantages compared to White students in UK Higher Education (Pilkington, A. 2013. "The Interacting Dynamics of Institutional Racism in Higher Education." "Race Ethnicity and Education" 16 (2): 225-245.). Evidence highlights that an attainment gap exists…

Background: Educational outcomes in the United Kingdom vary as a function of students' family background, with those of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and certain ethnic minority groups among the worst affected. Aims: This pre-registered study investigates: (i) whether knowledge about students' socioeconomic and ethnic background influences…

Both formative assessment and growth mindset scholars aim to understand how to enhance achievement. While research on formative assessment focuses on external teaching practices, work on growth mindset emphasises internal psychological processes. This study examined the interplay between three formative assessment strategies (i.e. sharing learning…

This dissertation consists of three papers about quantitative research methods in education. Each paper is a response to potential limitations of the current approach to building evidence for effective education -- an approach that is dominated by Randomized Controlled Trials of school programs, with mathematics and English achievement as primary…

Ocean literacy is an understanding of the ocean's influence on us and our influence on the ocean. A lack of ocean literacy presents a significant obstacle for citizens to engage in environmentally sustainable behaviour, and thus is acknowledged as a 'complex problem' that requires deliberative participation and joint-action by stakeholders across…

Age-classes are a salient feature of modern schooling. Yet how did age-grouping come to prevail in entire school systems? And how was this form of grouping related to educational and pedagogic discussions at the time of its emergence? The article addresses these issues by looking at the historical context within which age classes came to a…

This article traces the emergence of the term 'turbulence' to describe the educational disruption experienced by military children after 1945. It asks why the term came to dominate professional discussion of military education so much from the late 1960s onwards and the wider tensions it exposed in post-war Britain: between welfare and warfare;…

The 'dyslexia debate' is resilient. In the media, a key component of the debate is the notion that dyslexia does not exist, popularised by a series of vociferous commentators. For them, dyslexia is an invention of overly-concerned parents, supported by a clique of private educational psychologists willing to offer a diagnosis -- for a fee -- even…

Creativity is an inherent element of contemporary dance and is frequently cited as a key pedagogical objective of higher education dance training. Nevertheless, there is little writing about the means by which dance teachers understand, recognize, and subsequently assess creativity at the higher education level. We undertook semistructured…

This study is an interpretative discourse analysis [following Gee, J. P. 2005. "An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method." 2nd ed. New York: Routledge; Gee, J. P. 2011. "How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit." London: Routledge; and Willig, C. 2008. "Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology."…

Research emerging from the USA suggests that holding an incremental theory of intelligence (growth mindset) has a positive impact on academic success. However, limited empirical work has explored this relationship in a UK sample, and there has been a lack of research into the antecedents which might influence the development of certain…

Little is known about the etiology of developmental change and continuity in educational achievement. Here, we study achievement from primary school to the end of compulsory education for 6000 twin pairs in the UK-representative Twins Early Development Study sample. Results showed that educational achievement is highly heritable across school…