I recently noted how a newspaper reported that the Prime Minister had said that teachers must prepare catch-up plans for each pupil before the end of the summer term. I found this difficult to believe: surely even someone who is not a teacher would realise the impossibility of such a task, even at the best of times? So I went to the source, Hansard, and found that what had actually been said was that teachers should draw up catch-up plans for all of their pupils. That has quite a different meaning. It’s a good example, I think, of how using a near-synonym can inadvertently give readers the wrong impression.

I noted in a couple of presentations and a book chapter how newspapers either misreport educational research or report it in such a way as to inadvertently give a misleading impression. Sometimes it’s the words used in the article, or simply the headline. The first paragraph of a well-written news story gives the essence of the story in 25 words or less. Indeed, you could imbibe the entire day’s news just by reading the first paragraph of each article in the newspaper. But what you would miss out on is any nuance or deep explanation. That’s not a deliberate omission, of course. It’s simply very hard to convey an awful lot of nuance in 25 words. Unfortunately, when research in ed tech is reported in news outlets, the nuances and caveats, and useful information like sample size, are lost as well.

I wrote about how to use words and phrases to appear erudite in writing. This was tongue-in-cheek, but it did have some serious implications. For example, saying “It is amusing to note that…” has a different connotation to “It is interesting to note that…”. Saying that someone “insists” has a very different feel from writing that someone “states”.

All this is obvious, I suppose, but I think it’s good to remind ourselves every now and again.

Another article you may find useful and interesting is:

Fake news or just poor reporting?

Also, the slides from a presentation I’ve given on the subject. The slides you may find most apposite in the light of my news-related comments above are:

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Read all about it - how research is reported in newspapers, by Terry Freedman from Terry Freedman

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