Background: Data-based decision-making in education often focuses on the use of summative assessment data in order to bring about improvements in student achievement. However, many other sources of evidence are available across a wide range of indicators. There is potential for school leaders, teachers and students to use these diverse sources…

Background: Approaches to conducting research with children afford them varying degrees of participatory power. Despite children's varying roles within research, more needs to be understood about the influences of unintentional power plays and, in particular, interactions between participant and non-participants on children's participation in…

Background: Data for England from the national census can provide the socio-economic background of individual pupils and therefore the intake of schools. In many respects, this is more useful than the conventional measure of "free school meals", which has historically been used in the UK as a proxy measure for disadvantage. Prior to the…

Examines three reliability characteristics of the Harris revision of the Goodenough "Draw-a-man" Test when used with five-year-old school entrants. (Author/RK)

Quotes some conclusions from various sources regarding the wasting effects that addiction to inferential techniques have had, or could have, upon research into educational problems and assesses if these particular techniques are increasing or decreasing in popularity among British educational researchers. (Author/RK)

The investigation described here was carried out in the hope that some kind of classification of children's early written English could be found which would help them to learn sentence skills more effeciently. (Author/RK)

A national sample of pupils in multiracial schools answered questions about their actual and desired friendship choices. The sample comprised 1288 pupils in the second and fourth years of junior schools and 3012 pupils in the second and fourth years of secondary schools. (Author)

Neville Bennett's "Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress" has attracted widespread attention for its major conclusion that formal teaching styles foster greater pupil progress than more informal ones. Examines the adequacy of the research on which this claim is based. (Author/RK)

The relative effectiveness of two methods of instruction, orally-presented lessons and a written version of those lessons, was investigated using a post-test, an attitude scale, and time taken for instruction as criteria. (Author/RK)

Since season of birth is a factor in school performance, this research is based on the performance of children whose date of birth is held constant. (MB)

This research note reports an investigation into the relationship tetween date of birth and early performance at school and especially into whether there were more poor achievers'' born during the summer months than in other months. (Author)

The range of assessments made by teachers of the performance of their students in the Nuffield Advanced Biology project and the Nuffield Advanced Physical Science project was subjected to a factor analysis. (Author)

Children who are "at risk" of educational handicap, or who are likely to show a poor response to the experience of school require special help and care at the earliest opportunity. Discusses the complex relationships observed between a wide range of conditions, personal and environmental, of a large group of school children, and their subsequent…

This is a third and final paper on aspects of multiracial education, derived from data collected by the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales for the Department of Education and Science. (Author/RK)