Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?

'Bullshitters' are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining teenagers' propensity to claim expertise in three mathematics constructs that do not really exist. Using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from nine Anglophone countries and over 40,000 young people, we find substantial differences in young people's tendency to bullshit across countries, genders and socio-economic groups. Bullshitters are also found to exhibit high levels of overconfidence and believe they work hard, persevere at tasks, and are popular amongst their peers. Together this provides important new insight into who bullshitters are and the type of survey responses that they provide

Children in jobless households across Europe: Evidence on the association with medium- and long-term outcomes

The proportion of children living in a jobless household is a key indicator of social exclusion across Europe. Yet there is little evidence on the extent to which this measure of childhood deprivation is associated with later life outcomes. We use two harmonised cross-national data sources to consider the association between children experiencing jobless households and three medium- and long- term outcomes for the first time: education, adult joblessness and adult poverty. We find evidence of large penalties across all three outcomes in some countries while in other countries there are no longer-term associations with this indicator of social exclusion

Evaluation Protocol: First Thing Music

The First Thing Music programme aims to improve children’s reading and social skills by providing them with daily music sessions. The sessions are part of a structured music education programme based on the Kodály approach. Students will learn the basics of music through daily singing and musical games with teachers who will be trained by music practitioners. Music education has been linked to improvements in academic attainment in areas such as literacy and language.1 First Thing Music is part of a broader programme of work entitled ‘Learning About Culture’, which aims to improve the evidence base around arts-based education programmes. This is coordinated by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.2 It consists of five programmes: two in Key Stage 1 and three in Key Stage 2

The Craft of Writing

The Craft of Writing (CoW) intervention provides a sustained ‘Arvon experience’ developing teachers as writers and is combined with a more explicit focus on pedagogical implications for the classroom. The intervention will be underpinned by a Framework of Craft Knowledge cocreated with professional writers. This will make visible what the teachers are learning about writing – the process of writing; linguistic choices; and narrative/poetic techniques – and it will be used to support teachers in integrating what they learn from the Arvon experience into their routine teaching of writing

Young Journalist Academy

Young Journalist Academy (YJA) is an intervention that establishes journalism programmes or ‘newsrooms’ in primary schools. Primary school pupils, typically in Year 5 (9 to 10 years old), receive training from YJA staff and then develop and lead their own ‘newsrooms’ in their schools. They produce journalistic outputs in various forms over the course of a school year. These outputs could include print, audio or video content, which are published for the school and on the YJA website for a wider audience. The programme has been developed to stimulate interest in journalism as well as improve pupils’ writing skills and motivation for learning

Power of Pictures

The Power of Pictures (PoP) is a programme that uses the creation of picture books to develop primary school pupils’ writing skills. Through its programme, PoP aims to enhance teachers’ understanding of the power of picture books and increase teachers’ comfort in and ability to teach using picture books to a range of ages. In the last year, the PoP team has worked with 65 teachers in 40 schools

An information distortion model of social class differences in math self-concept, intrinsic value and utility value

In this paper, we develop an information distortion model (IDM) of social class differences in self-beliefs and values. The IDM combines psychological biases on frame-of-reference effects with sociological foci on ability stratification. This combination is hypothesized to lead to working-class children having more positive math self-beliefs and values than equally able salariat children. We further suggest that the same conditions that give rise to the working-class benefit in self-beliefs and values are associated with signaling effects that suppress educational aspirations and attainment. These hypotheses are tested in 1 cross-sectional multinational and 1 longitudinal study. The results in favor of the IDM challenge cultural models of social class differences and have implications for rational action theory

Rotten Egg Nebula: The magnetic field of a binary evolved star

Most of PNe are not spherical. The loss of spherical symmetry occurs somewhere between the AGB and PN phase. The cause of this change of morphology is not yet well known, but magnetic fields are one of the possible agents. Its origin remains to be determined, and potentially requires the presence of a massive companion to the AGB star. Therefore, further detections of the magnetic field around evolved stars (in particular those thought to be part of a binary system) are crucial to improve our understanding of the origin and role of magnetism on evolved stars. One such binaries is the pre-PN OH231.8, around which a magnetic field was detected in the OH maser region of the outer circumstellar envelope. We aim to detect and infer the properties of the magnetic field of this source in the water maser region. We observed the 6_{1,6}-5_{2,3} water maser rotational transition to determine its linear and circular polarization. These emissions are located within the inner regions of OH231.8 (at few tens of AU). We detected 30 water maser features, which occur in two distinct regions that are moving apart with a velocity on the sky of 2.3 mas/year. Taking into account the inclination angle of the source, this corresponds to an average separation velocity of 21 km/s. Based on the velocity gradient of the maser emission, the masers appear to be dragged along the direction of the nebula jet. Linear polarization is present in 3 of the features, and circular polarization was detected in the 2 brightest ones. We found that the strength of the magnetic field is |B_{||}|~45 mG which, when assuming a toroidal magnetic field, implies B~2.5 G on the stellar surface. The morphology of the field is not yet determined, but the high scatter found on the directions of the linear polarization vectors could indicate that the masers occur near the tangent points of a toroidal field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure