Teachers, examiners and assessment experts know from experience that some candidates annotate exam questions. "Annotation" includes anything the candidate writes or draws outside of the designated response space, such as underlining, jotting, circling, sketching and calculating. Annotations are of interest because they may evidence…

This paper gives the rationale and a draft outline for a framework for education to teach epistemic insight into schools in England. The motivation to research and propose a strategy to teach and assess epistemic insight followed research that investigated how students and teachers in primary and secondary schools respond to "big…

We report on a large-scale survey of 1,772 upper-secondary school students in 16 Church of England schools to discover their perceptions of how science and religion relate. We found that students who attend Church schools are pedagogically, socially and cognitively confined to the view that science and religion conflict. The findings are discussed…

Epistemic Insight is a research and education initiative that is seeking to establish effective ways to help school students to appreciate the power and limitations of science. In particular, the idea is that experiences and explanations devised by a teacher who is focused on what happens inside the science classroom might not be interpreted as…

Core maths (CM) qualifications were introduced into the post-16 curriculum in England in 2014, with first assessments in 2016. They are a suite of qualifications aimed at students who achieve a grade 4 (originally a grade C) or higher at GCSE Maths but do not go on to take AS or A level Maths. This group comprised around 40% of all students in…

Gendered barriers in education and attrition along the academic and professional pipeline are key determinants of the current STEM skills shortage. While enrolment in STEM undergraduate courses has been increasing in the recent decades, STEM degree choices still suffer from considerable gender imbalance, whereby women are underrepresented in…

This paper asks the question: do people with different levels of research productivity and identification as a researcher think of research differently? It discusses a study that differentiated levels of research productivity among English and Australian academics working in research-intensive environments in three broad discipline areas: science,…

Industry standards are used in many disciplines, including science and technology areas. To date, little research has been conducted regarding the citing of standards in scholarly publications. The aim of this study was to answer two questions: Are standards being cited in scholarly publications? And, if so, what are the characteristics of the…

Given that postsecondary institutions are increasingly seen as sites to promote health, critical scholars are calling attention to how the contemporary Western weight-centred health paradigm reinforces a "size matters" message that is fueling harmful attitudes towards and judgments of bodies. As such, research that highlights strategies…

The primary objective of this paper is to discuss the implications of applying Habermas's concept of self-critical appropriation for rethinking the structure of the modernist curriculum, specifically the organization of school subjects and instruction time devoted to each of them. To this end, the paper examines Habermas's differentiation between…

One consequence of school performance measures is the prioritisation of some school subjects above others. The English Baccalaureate (EBacc), introduced in England in 2011, measures pupils' progress in five subjects only (English, mathematics, science, a humanities subject and a language), and excludes creative subjects such as design and…

Exchanges of learning and controversies between engineers and mathematicians were important factors in the development of early modern science. This theme is discussed by focusing, first, on architectural and mathematical dynamism in mid 16th-century Milan. While some engineers-architects referred to Euclid and Vitruvius for improving their…

Openness to experience is the broadest personality domain of the Big Five, including a mix of traits relating to intellectual curiosity, intellectual interests, perceived intelligence, imagination, creativity, artistic and aesthetic interests, emotional and fantasy richness, and unconventionality. Likewise, creative achievement is a broad…

The present paper describes a four-year project involving the development of a new instrument, the "Attitudes to School Science and Science" instrument, and its use to collect baseline attitudinal data from 280 students aged 11, 14, and 16 years. A key feature of the instrument is that it collects both descriptive and explanatory data in…

In this paper we combine the findings from two recent studies relating to participation and attainment in school science --a re-analysis of existing official data for England and a review of wider international research evidence in the literature relevant to the UK. Although the secondary data are drawn mainly from England, the comprehensiveness…