At this year’s British Educational Research Association conference David Budge discovers that 42 is not the answer and Maureen O’Connor reports on the pick of the papers at an event that remained upbeat in the face of criticism.
* Best paper title: “Educating Sita: the Education of British Asian Girls”, by Harkirtan Singh-Raud, Liverpool John Moores University
* Best quote: “I’m ready to come out as a radical feminist,” James Tooley
* Best acronym: SODs (sources of difficulty - in GCSE maths questions) - University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate paper
* Academic obfuscation award: “Borgatta and Bohrnsted (1981) maintain that a monotonic relationship should be assumed between the manifest scale and the underlying construct.”- Susan Davies, Oxford Brookes University.
Research on the web
Abstracts of all the papers presented at the BERA conference are accessible free via the World Wide Web. The British Education Index team who manage the Education-line site (http:www.leeds.ac.ukeducol) have also invited BERA presenters to store their full papers in the electronic archive. Education-line, which was launched this year, is being supported by the Higher Education Funding Councils. Education-line also has abstracts of papers being delivered at this weekend’s Scottish Educational Research Association Conference in Dundee.
