Research exploring the educational relevance of wellbeing only tentatively confronts the 'tension' of expecting educators to nurture pupils' wellbeing while school effectiveness is evaluated by metrics of academic performance. Complete wellbeing includes hedonia (feeling) and eudaimonia (doing) well. Accordingly, school 'happiness agendas'…

This paper uses a newly discovered data set on examination results by gender from 1913 to 1986 to show that the gender gap in examinations at the University of Oxford has existed for over a century. We show that after declining for almost 70 years the gender gap in Firsts increased significantly after the introduction of coresidence -- the…

Current literature on higher education (HE) performance only considers the production of graduates and not graduate employment. The latter needs to be factored into the HE production model as it not only measures the true impact of HE institutions (HEIs), but also provides policy implications on how resources should be allocated. Furthermore, the…

The main aim of this research was to investigate the impact of reducing the number of components on overall performance in GCSE subjects. In particular, researchers were interested in how the grade achieved by candidates on a reduced number of components compares to their grade on the full qualification. This research mainly looked at GCSEs with…

This research draws on evidence from three qualifications taken in autumn 2020, when comparative judgement (CJ) was used as a key source of data in setting grade boundaries. In these cases, a separate CJ exercise was completed for each individual paper in the qualification so that standards could be maintained from a previous series. In this…

Background: Higher education institutions and universities aim to provide students with a range of transferable skills that enable them to become more thoughtful and effective employees, citizens, and consumers. One of these skills is critical thinking. Objective: The aim of the present research was to examine whether taking a psychology degree is…

It is not uncommon for randomised trials in education to have the performance of sample members in national examinations as their primary outcome. In many cases, examination results are available as summary measures only. Taking the example of GCSE examination results in England, this paper shows that using summary measures of an underlying score…

Aim/Purpose: To encourage students' engagement in peer assessments and provide students with better-quality feedback, this paper describes a technique for author-reviewer matching in peer assessment systems -- a Balanced Allocation algorithm. Background: Peer assessment concerns evaluating the work of colleagues and providing feedback on their…

Given the increased interest in character education across the world, educators are seeking guidance for their practice. This paper seeks to add to the evidence base about if and how character can be taught by discussing the results of a pilot evaluation (n=527) of a curriculum intervention designed to enhance two components of character: virtue…

This paper aims to assess the impact of using GCSE grades as a primary outcome in educational evaluations and trials, compared to using marks. The choice of grades or marks is relevant as many evaluations use GCSE performance as an outcome measure. For such evaluations, the National Pupil Database (NPD) is used as a source of data by the vast…

The aim of the research reported here was to get some idea of the accuracy of grade boundaries (cut-scores) obtained by applying the 'similar items method' described in Bramley & Wilson (2016). In this method experts identify items on the current version of a test that are sufficiently similar to items on previous versions for them to be…

A long-established literature has found that anxiety about testing is negatively related to academic achievement. Yet there remains some debate as to whether this is simply due to less academically able pupils being more likely to develop education-related anxiety issues. This paper presents new evidence on this matter, focusing upon how test…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the very youngest pupils in schools had their schooling and social interactions in the classroom disrupted by lengthy periods of school closures and remote learning. This research focuses particularly on these young pupils, and is exploring how their learning and social skills are recovering two years on from the…

School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, where the school effects are the school means of the…

In England, there are persistent associations between measures of socio-economic advantage and educational outcomes. Research on the history of names, meanwhile, confirms that surnames in England--like many other countries--were highly socially stratified in their origins. These facts prompted us to wonder whether educational outcomes in England…