Literacy

This article describes one primary school’s approach to countering the “summer drop” in reading achievement. By the deliberate sharing of strategies to support reading at home during the holidays through a “summer reading contract”, Clayton Park School has successfully reduced the drop in reading achievement over the summer, including for the lowest performing students across all ethnicities.

That students find working on multimodal texts engaging isn’t surprising—but what would be surprising is if that spilled over into increased engagement and achievement with traditional print texts. This is exactly what the author of this article found in an exploratory e-learning research project. Here she discusses this finding and explores some of the possible reasons behind it.

Peer assessment is now considered a necessary and vital strategy to be embedded within an assessment for learning framework. Grounded in teachers’ practice, this article pays particular attention to the learning environments created by two teachers as they incorporated peer assessment into their primary school classroom programmes. It illustrates the kinds of experiences, interactions and opportunities needed to ensure peer assessment is infused into the learning environment prior to, during and after the production of work.

A new series in which we ask a leading researcher to distil three key ideas from an aspect of their work over the years.