Skip to the main content.

Cambridge Insight Blog

Read the latest articles on education and assessment written by teachers, school leaders and assessment experts.

An abstract image of a head silhouette with cogs representing the brain

4 min read

Standardised Tests 101 – how and why tests are standardised

Standardising a test score is fairly straightforward and I walked readers through the process here. As I said, however, “deciding whether test scores reported in this way are meaningful depends on a number of other variables which come into play –...

Read More

3 min read

Maths is for life…not just for Christmas

Have you written your Christmas list yet? What if the educational community had a stocking? What presents would we want to wake up to?

Read More

3 min read

5 ways schools can evaluate their impact

Each year, the education system spends astonishing amounts of money on implementing educational initiatives which often yield only negligible impact...

Read More

2 min read

5 top tips for NQTs to crack assessment

Your first year of teaching presents you with a wealth of challenges. How do you manage behaviour? How do you cope with the workload? How can you do...

Read More
Hand picking up a switched on light bulb

4 min read

Evidence-based policy & practice in education – knowledge in the light or strategy in the dark?

The term ‘evidence-based policy’ rose to particular prominence in the early years of the New Labour administration, following the 1997 general...

Read More
Wooden carvings with drawn on facial expressions

2 min read

Measuring Progress in Education

At the 10th Annual Festival of Education, held at the beautiful Wellington College, we (as the Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring, CEM, now Cambridge...

Read More
The Big Evidence Debate with names of speakers

1 min read

The Big Evidence Debate – Catch Up

On Tuesday 4th June 2019 we held the first ever Big Evidence Debate. Leading educational experts Dylan Wiliam and Larry Hedges gave fascinating...

Read More
4 Chairs with The good, the bad and the future stuck on. The bad being emphasised as a pink chair

4 min read

Measuring Progress in Education – The good, the bad and the future

In recent years, ‘progress’ or ‘growth’ has become a much-discussed issue in education. The terminology has often been used to mean a numerical...

Read More
Man hiding from an evil hand shadow coming from a bar graph

3 min read

Progress measures are the root of all evil

In their pursuit of a number - a neat proxy for the distance travelled between two points - schools can do some crazy stuff.

Read More
Geeky glasses and a red clown nose

5 min read

Is meta-analysis all just ‘an exercise in mega-silliness’?

To my mind, there was something heroic about Gene Glass’ presidential address to the 1976 American Educational Research Association annual meeting....

Read More