The Learning Scientists

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Weekly Digest #15: Working Out What Works - Highlights From researchED Maths & Science

One of us recently had the lucky opportunity to attend and present at a researchED conference – one of a series of conferences put on by a very engaged grassroots teacher organization. While Tom Bennett collects blogs and presentation slides to put on the website, we thought we would collect some of the summaries for those who weren’t able to attend.

To depict which sessions each of the 5 resource covers, here is the schedule of the day with numbers referring to the numbered resources below.

1) Storify by the Education in Chemistry magazine, from the Royal Society of Chemistr, @RSC_EIC

If you don’t know what a Storify is, it’s a great way to collect and simplify tweets into a coherent story. Since researchED was born from and thrives on Twitter, naturally there were hundreds of tweets flying every minute during the conference. (In fact, the conference hashtag #rEDMatSci was trending at #3 in the UK throughout the day!) This Storify very nicely pulls out the key tweets that summarize the event. And if you like this format, you can check out this one as well.

The next three resources are all blog posts by conference attendees who visited various talks, as indicated in the schedule above (all 3 authors happen to be secondary school math teachers):

2) researchED maths and science 2016 by Louise, @Loumeracy

3) researchED Maths and Science 2016 by Jemma Sherwood, @jemmaths

4) researchED Maths and Science 2016 by Jo Morgan, @mathsjem

5) Heresy? By Dave Aldridge, @zudensachen

Some of you may be surprised that this piece made it into one of our digests; it goes rather against the grain of our emphasis on research-based practice and knowledge-based definitions of learning. However, it makes points that may resonate with some of our readers, and deserve to be discussed. We leave you with this quote, which touches on aspects of education that are outside of our purview as learning scientists:


Every Sunday, we pick a theme and provide a curated list of links. If you have a theme suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us! Our 5 most recent digests can be found here:

Weekly Digest #10: How to Grade Writing Assignments

Weekly Digest #11: Revisiting Standardized Testing

Weekly Digest #12: How To Make Standardized Testing Better

Weekly Digest #13: How Teachers Implement Retrieval in their Classrooms

Weekly Digest #14: How To Encourage Students To Transfer Their Knowledge