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Cambridge Insight Blog

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

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 your best? How will you know if you are a good teacher?

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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.

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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....

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5 min read

Meta-analysis: Don’t do it or Do it more carefully?

Meta-analyses (like the popular Sutton Trust Tool Kit and Hattie’s Visible Learning) apparently offer a more sophisticated and orderly approach to...

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5 min read

Is meta-analysis the best we can do?

By Professor Steve Higgins Is meta-analysis in its current state trustworthy enough to be a basis for practitioner decisions? It all depends on what...

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3 min read

The Big Evidence Debate: Introducing the 50% rule

As a news editor, I developed my own 50% rule: reporters should spend as much time writing their stories as getting the stories in the first place....

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