Dr Steph Ainsworth

• My research on phonological development provided evidence of vocabulary-driven restructuring of children’s phonological representations (Ainsworth, Welbourne and Hesketh, 2016). As well as being theoretically interesting, this work has important implications for education in relation to the timing of phonological instruction in school and for the clinical assessment of young children’s language skills.
• My paper on the affective potential of grammar learning (Ainsworth & Bell, 2020) bringing together ideas from education, psychology and philosophy argues is attracting attention in the field of language education. It addresses the perennial question of how we might foster authentic engagement within classrooms. This paper argues that rather than focusing on fostering achievement emotions within education, we need to consider how epistemic emotions might be cultivated to harness the affective potential of particular subjects.
• My work on teacher resilience (Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2019; Oldfield and Ainsworth, 2021) was the first to quantitively model the resilience process in teachers, disrupting individualist discourses around resilience by demonstrating that contextual factors (e.g. support from leadership) are at least as important as individual factors (e.g. self-esteem). This paper attracted great interest within the international academic community as well as amongst schools and third sector organisations. It acted as a springboard for the ESRC project, where we will work together with schools and other partners to promote teacher resilience both regionally and nationally.

Current projects

I am Principal Investigator for a three-year project, which is part of the ESRC’s Education Research Programme, working in collaboration with Dr Jez Oldfield, 8 partner schools, the NEU and Education Support. This project, ‘Decentring the resilient teacher: exploring interactions between teachers and their social ecologies’, will promote teacher resilience in schools by exploring the factors which affect teachers at the individual and school level. It will involve multi-level modelling of large-scale survey data, place-based case studies and the development of ‘ecological interventions’ within schools. The findings will be used to empower educators across the UK via creation and dissemination of an online package of resources which will be shared with schools and policy audiences and used to promote teacher resilience both locally and nationally.

I am Co-investigator on an evaluation project for the Education Endowment Foundation working in collaboration with Prof Cathy Lewin, Prof Steve Morris and Dr Kate Wicker. We are evaluating the PALS-UK intervention, which aims to improve children’s reading comprehension skills. The intervention is being delivered by Dr Helen Breadmore (University of Birmingham), Dr Emma Vardy and Luisa Tarczynski-Bowles (Nottingham Trent University).

Recent projects

I recently completed a research project with digital tutoring company PLYTIME Learning. We investigated the relative impact of distributed (spread out) versus massed (all-in-one go) tutoring on children’s mathematics progress. Year 5 children who received three 15 minute sessions of tutoring a week made better progress on average than children who received one 45 minute tutoring session a week. The full report can be found here. 

Initial Teacher Education

I am a passionate teacher educator who enjoys supporting students on their journeys to becoming qualified teachers. I teach on both the BA Primary Education and PGCE Primary Education programmes across a number of units. I specialise in primary English but I also enjoy integrating my research on teacher wellbeing into the programmes.

Postgraduate Teaching

I am currently unit leader for the Introduction to Research Methods unit on the PhD Education Research. I also supervise students on this programme as well as the EdD, PhD Education and PhD Psychology programmes.

I enjoying supervising students across a number of areas (see below). My current areas of interest include teacher education, teacher wellbeing, emotions in education and language development.

Current doctoral students:

Karin Boyle - A multiple case study of reading comprehension: How do teachers teach and understand their teaching of reading comprehension?

Eleanor Grace - Bullying of LGBT+ pupils: School contextual risk and protective factors.

Houda Zouar - From Theory to Practice: the professional identity development of student teachers of English within the context of the Algerian École Normale Supérieure.

Abby Connolly -  My Friends, My Voices and Me: Exploring voice hearing and imaginary friends in childhood.  

Rahma Jawad - Investigating the impact of rich media resources on students’ self-efficacy, statistics anxiety and performance.

Previous doctoral students:

Dr Chloe-Amelia Turnbull - Exploring autonomy and agency in the early years classroom using notions of figured worlds

Dr Nicky Martins - Art and Design Learning Journey: Interactions Between Learners and Materials.

Dr Chris Fielding - Inclusion for the excluded: Applying critical realism within an alternative provision academy for excluded primary school pupils

I am currently involved in research across the following areas: teacher wellbeing, emotions in education, disciplinary aesthetics, phonological development, the teaching of reading, and grammar learning. A common theme across these interests is a desire to explore ways in which the areas of education and psychology can be usefully connected to solve problems which are of contemporary interest to schools.