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Learn about the research projects.
- Collaborative Evidence Network projects (CENs)
- Headsprout Early Reading in Special Schools project (HERiSS)
- Interventions promoting positive child outcomes - implementation science
- Mathematical fluency education - SAFMEDS
- Teaching Shakespeare in the UK and East Asia
- National Strategy for Educational Research and Enquiry (NSERE)
- Evidence Informed Profesional Project (EIPP)
- National Professional Enquiry Project (NPEP)
- Wales Collaborative for Learning Design (WCLD)
- Ein Llais Ni project
- Accessing Welsh during the Covid-19 pandemic
- Grwp ymchwil CaDWaB (Cymraeg a Dwyieithrwydd/Welsh and Bilingualism) research group
Collaborative Evidence Network projects (CENs)
The School of Educational Sciences and won over £600,000 funding from Welsh Government in 2021-22 for a suite of research projects into the impacts of Covid-19 on the education sector in Wales and to aid pandemic recovery. In keeping with Welsh Government priorities, many of the projects focus on those most vulnerable to the negative consequences of pandemic disruption to education: children and young adults with Additional Learning Needs (ALN), from refugee families and traveller communities, and Welsh language learners in English-speaking families/communities.
The projects have seen members of the School work with colleagues from GwE (the North Wales regional school improvement service), Cardiff Metropolitan to Glyndwr universities, as well as the relevant national Collaborative Research Networks, to ensure nationwide representation and benefits.
Around twenty staff members in the School are involved in the twelve È«Ãñ²ÊƱ projects, with oversight from Professor Carl Hughes (Head of School), Dr Richard Watkins (GwE), Dr Sarah Olive (School Director of Research) and PhD-student Fatema Sultana.
Headsprout Early Reading in Special Schools project (HERiSS)
For over 10 years, we have been conducting applied research in schools in Wales and England relating to aspects of literacy teaching practices in both mainstream primary and special schools. One aspect of this work relates to a programme called Headsprout, which is a commercially available computer-based programme developed by a group of learning scientists based in the USA. Given the scientifically robust instructional design and the extensive formative evaluation the programme underpinning the programme, we began piloting and evaluating the use of the programme in UK schools. The HERiSS project is led by Dr Emily Roberts-Tyler and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation. It builds on pilot work conducted at È«Ãñ²ÊƱ. It will evaluate the effects of a computer-based early reading programme on reading skills for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities in special schools. For further details, please visit the project page.
The purpose of our mainstream school research was to determine whether the programme is effective for pupils in UK schools. In 2015, we published the first UK evaluation of the programme in mainstream schools. Since then, over 100 schools across north Wales have used the programme, including many schools we have worked with to use the programme to support reading instruction during covid-19 school closures. We’re in the process of establishing precise figures and estimated pupil numbers.
Our special school work has been the first published research to pilot and evaluate the use of Headsprout Early Reading with children with learning disabilities in special schools. We have several publications on this work (Grindle et al., 2013; Tyler et al., 2015; Roberts-Tyler et al., 2019, which has resulted in the development of an implementation support manual for use of the programme with children with special educational needs and disabilities. Following the promising outcomes of this pilot work, and that undertaken to establish that rigorous research designs can be successfully conducted in these settings, we were awarded over £400,000 by the Education Endowment Foundation to conduct a cluster Randomised Controlled Trial in special schools in England. This trial is now underway, with 55 schools and over 400 children participating.
In addition to the research and impact work relating to Headsprout, Roberts-Tyler is also leading ongoing work relating to reading fluency interventions in schools. In summary, we have developed 2 research-based reading fluency interventions, and have conducted a c-RCT comparing the two interventions (manuscript currently in preparation). We have recently further developed the intervention resources, including the development of equivalent Welsh language resources. Over 60 schools across the region have benefitted from these interventions. We are currently working on a school-home hybrid model to increase practice opportunities, and are collaborating with schools to develop a feasible model for progress monitoring to allow schools to effectively monitor the impact of reading interventions with their pupils.
Interventions promoting positive child outcomes - implementation science
Implementation science is the study of methods and strategies to facilitate the uptake of evidence-based practice and research into services. Since 1986 the team in the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention (CEBEI) have evaluated, devised and implemented child-focused programmes in service settings, including evaluating their long-term effectiveness against other treatments. Dr Margiad Williams is the School of Educational Sciences’ lead on this research, with Professor Judy Hutchings (Psychology) the overall Centre lead.
Critical research has resulted in global impact for childhood interventions including in low- and middle-income countries. This includes the uptake of the World Health Organisation sponsored 2-9 years programme in 25 countries (to date) and the training of 800 leaders and at least 9000 parents (to date). This also includes whole country implementation in Montenegro as well as initial evidence for the Book Sharing programme (originally from South Africa). CEBEI researchers have evaluated its feasibility as a school delivered and online intervention. A recent Nuffield grant with collaborators at Cambridge University, Early Intervention Foundation, and Dartington Social Research Unit, will extend the online work. Hutchings and Williams are also developing an online Book Sharing training for classroom support staff.
This research programme also involves work around the KiVa anti-bullying intervention in schools. The Children's Early Intervention Trust, a training charity closely affiliated with CEBEI, is the only KiVa training hub in the UK. Over 200 UK schools have been trained benefitting an estimated 31,500 children (to date). A large NIHR-funded trial, with partners in Cardiff, Exeter, Oxford and Warwick Universities, of the programme's effectiveness is ongoing. Previous evaluations in Wales have shown promising results. CEBEI has also developed parenting programmes based on Hutchings' earlier work (COPING online programme and Enhancing Parenting Skills programme). Small trials have shown promising results; current interest in Wales including a funded KESS scholarship with Flintshire Parenting service.
Mathematical fluency education - SAFMEDS
For the last 15 years education researchers in Bangor have been investigating the use of a fluency-building strategy called Say-All-Fast-Minute-Every-Day-Shuffled (SAFMEDS) that pupils can use to practice and assess fact-based skills, such as arithmetic. Over recent years, researchers in the have been working with to develop SAFMEDS resources and training for schools across the North Wales region. This work aims to develop teachers’ professional development and improve pupils’ mathematics/numeracy skills and is currently being led by Dr Kaydee Owen, Professor Carl Hughes, Dr Richard Watkins (GwE), in collaboration with GwE’s mathematics and numeracy improvement advisors.
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a shift to emergency education leading to the launch of ato facilitate additional fluency practice from home and a trial of online implementation support. A PhD studentship will help the project to continue its work, with a focus on evaluating different modalities of implementation and the co-development of a training programme with parents/guardians.
In 2021, we published a cluster-RCT evaluating the effect of implementation support following teacher training for the and a qualitative evaluation of the perceived benefits and challenges of the . Collectively this work has informed the development of future training and evaluations.
Teaching Shakespeare in the UK and East Asia
Dr Sarah Olive has developed a long-standing programme of research on Shakespeare in education, within which individual projects have been funded by the AHRC, British Academy, Daiwa Foundation, ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (University of York) and Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. This research explores Shakespeare in education internationally, although its publications concentrate on policy, pedagogy and performance in the UK, East and South-East Asia. The research programmes have analysed teacher and student perspectives on Shakespeare in Hong Kong, Korea, and Vietnam, with further research in the pipeline on Shakespeare in Japanese higher education. The research concentrates on the following sectors: secondary schools, higher education institutions as well as theatre, arts and heritage education. It has involved collaborating with Dr Victoria (Velda) Elliott (Education, Oxford) on the , with participating teachers from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Olive’s monograph, was published in 2015 (Intellect, Bristol). She is the lead author of , co-authored with Kohei Uchimaru (Osaka City University), Adele Lee (Emerson College) and Rosalind Fielding (University of Birmingham), published in 2021 as part of Palgrave's Global Shakespeare series. The research programme underpinned Olive’s founding of the freely available, online magazine through the British Shakespeare Association. She edited twenty-one issues from 2011-2021, working closely with the designer Becky Chilcott and guest editors of special issues on topics such as teaching Shakespeare in Leeds (Claire Chambers, York), in Japan (Uchimaru above and Anthony Martin, Waseda), as part of a wider spectrum of early modern drama (Duncan Lees, Warwick), and during Covid-19 lockdown (Ronan Hatfull, Warwick). Contributors during her editorship wrote out of 18 countries, with the readership spanning 60 nations. The magazine serves educators working across diverse sectors and levels of education including Special Education Needs (SEN) units and prison education.