The Most Significant Education Studies of 2023

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2023.

For me, the common thread in these studies is the teaching techniques we learned during our schooling and from our own classroom teaching experiences are very often validated by quantitative research. Sometimes old wives’ tales turn out to be true and evidence-based!

Some highlights from last year’s research studies:

• Heightened student academic performance results when teachers get to know their students as unique individuals as well as create a classroom culture of trust, support, and purpose
• Students’ storing and retrieving content from long-term memory is strengthened through frequent low-stakes assessments and from demonstrating their understanding in multiple ways
• Proficient reading comprehension requires both structured and systematic skill building and background knowledge
• To reduce stress, anxiety, and depression in students, adults (parents and teachers) need to give kids more opportunities to be independent and autonomous—too much adult supervision is contrary to kids’ growth and self-confidence
• AI will never replace the emotional needs and support students get from their teachers. 

It’s always affirming to see education research confirm Trinity’s program and pedagogy!

Joe

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A NEW THEORY ABOUT THE TEEN MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS: Parents, teachers, and medical professionals are wringing their hands over the alarming, decades-long rise in teenage mental health issues, including depression, feelings of persistent hopelessness, and drug addiction. The root causes remain elusive—cell phones and social media are prime suspects—but a recent study offers another explanation that’s gaining traction: After scouring surveys, data sets, and cultural artifacts, researchers theorized that a primary cause is “a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.” Scholarly reviews of historical articles, books, and advice columns on child rearing depict an era when young children “walked or biked to school alone,” and contributed to their “family’s well being” and “community life” through meaningful chores and jobs. Risky play and unsupervised outdoor activities, meanwhile, which might “protect against the development of phobias” and reduce “future anxiety by increasing the person’s confidence that they can deal effectively with emergencies,” are often frowned upon. That last point is crucial, because dozens of studies suggest that happiness in childhood, and then later in adolescence, is driven by internal feelings of “autonomy, competence, and relatedness”—and independent play, purposeful work, and important roles in classrooms and families are vital, early forms of practice. Whatever the causes, young children seem to sense that something’s off.

MORE EVIDENCE FOR MOVING PAST “FINDING THE MAIN IDEA”: In the United States, the teaching of reading comprehension has ping-ponged between skills-based and knowledge-based approaches. In 2019, things appeared to come to a head: While reading programs continued to emphasize transferable skills like “finding the main idea” or “making inferences,” the author Natalie Wexler published The Knowledge Gap, an influential takedown of skills-based methods, and a large 2022 study concurred, noting that “exposing kids to rich content in civics, history, and law” taught reading more effectively than skills-based approaches. Now a pair of new, high-quality studies—featuring leading researchers and encompassing more than 5,000 students in 39 schools—appears to put the finishing touches on a decades-long effort to push background knowledge to the forefront of reading instruction. In a Harvard study, 3,000 elementary students participated in a yearlong literacy program focused on the “knowledge rich” domains of social studies and science, exploring the methods used to study past events, for example, or investigating how animals evolve to survive in different habitats. Compared to their counterparts in business-as-usual classes, the “knowledge based” readers scored 18 percent higher on general reading comprehension. Background knowledge acts like a scaffold, the researchers explained, helping students “connect new learning to a general schema and transfer their knowledge to related topics.” The other study examined the impact of the “Core Knowledge” program on 2,310 students in nine Colorado charter schools from kindergarten to sixth grade. The approach improved reading scores by 16 percentile point. The pendulum is swinging, but the researchers caution against overreach: There appear to be “two separate but complementary cognitive processes involved in development and learning: ‘skill building’ and ‘knowledge accumulation,’” they clarified. We may have the balance out of whack, but to develop proficient readers, you need both.

A FASCINATING GUIDE TO BETTER QUIZZING: A study sings the praises of virtually every kind of test, quiz, and knowledge game, asserting that such assessments should be frequent, low-stakes, highly engaging, and even communal. Their rationale: When properly designed and stripped of dread, tests and quizzes dramatically improve “long-term retention and the creation of more robust retrieval routes for future access,” a well-established phenomenon known as the testing effect. The study is a fascinating, granular look at the mechanics of testing and its impacts on learning. Here are some of the highlights: 

HOW TONE OF VOICE CHANGES CLASSROOM CULTURE: Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, subtle shifts in a teacher’s tone of voice—a sharp rise in volume or a sudden barrage of repeated instructions born of frustration—can be the first sign that something’s awry in the classroom, disturbing a fragile equilibrium and leading students to clam up or act out. Researchers observed as teens and preteens listened to instructions given by teachers—“I’m waiting for people to quiet down” or “It’s time to tidy up all of your belongings,” for example—delivered in warm, neutral, or controlling tones. While the effect was unintended, an authoritative tone often came off as confrontational, undermining students’ sense of competence and discouraging them from confiding in teachers. Warm, supportive tones, on the other hand, contributed to a classroom environment that reinforced learning across multiple social and academic dimensions like sense of belonging, autonomy, and enjoyment of the class. 

MATH PICTURE BOOKS WORK: A review of 16 studies concluded that math books improved student engagement and attitudes toward math; strengthened kids’ grasp of math representations like graphs or physical models; and boosted performance on tasks like counting to 20, understanding place value, and calculating diameters. In early childhood, in particular, math picture books worked wonders—one study found that young students “tend to anticipate and guess what will happen next, resulting in high engagement, aroused interest in understanding the problems, and curiosity in finding solutions”—but even middle school students seemed mesmerized by math read-alouds. Importantly, math picture books weren’t a substitute for procedural fluency or mathematical practice. Typically, the authors noted, teachers bracketed math units with picture books, introducing a mathematical concept “in order to prepare students for the upcoming practice and activities,” or, alternatively, used them to review material at the end of the lesson.

A TRULY MASSIVE REVIEW FINDS VALUE IN SEL—AGAIN: It’s déjà vu all over again. The researcher Joseph Durlak, who put social and emotional learning on the map with his 2011 study that concluded that SEL programs boosted academic performance by an impressive 11 percentile points, was back at it in 2023. He published a comprehensive meta-analysis that surveyed a 424 studies involving over half a million K–12 students, scrutinizing school-based SEL programs and strategies such as mindfulness, interpersonal skills, classroom management, and emotional intelligence. The findings: Students who participated in such programs experienced “improved academic achievement, school climate, school functioning, social emotional skills, attitudes, and prosocial and civic behaviors,” the researchers concluded.

TO IMPROVE STUDENT WRITING, REDUCE FEEDBACK (AND PUT THE ONUS ON KIDS): It’s hard to move the needle on student writing. Without guidance, revisions tend to be superficial; students might correct typos and grammatical mistakes or make cursory adjustments to a few ideas, but leave it at that. A promising, time-saving alternative is to deploy rubrics, mentor texts, and other clarifying writing guidelines. In the study, high school students were graded on the clarity, sophistication, and thoroughness of their essays before being split into groups to test the effectiveness of various revision strategies. Students who consulted rubrics that spelled out the elements of an excellent essay—a clear central thesis, support for the claim, and cohesive overall structure, for example—improved their performance by a half-letter grade while kids who read mentor texts boosted scores by a third of a letter grade. Rubrics and mentor texts are reusable, “increase teachers’ efficient use of time,” and “enhance self-feedback” in a way that can lead to better, more confident writers down the line, the new research suggests.

DIRECT INSTRUCTION AND INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING ARE COMPLEMENTARY: It’s an often-fiery but ultimately dubious debate: Should teachers employ direct instruction, or opt for inquiry-based learning? At its core, direct instruction often conveys information “by lecturing and by giving a leading role to the teacher,” explained a recent study examining the evidence supporting both approaches. Critics typically focus solely on its passive qualities, a straw-man argument that ignores activities such as note-taking, practice quizzes, and classroom discussions. Opponents of inquiry-based learning, meanwhile, characterize it as chaotic, akin to sending students on a wild goose chase and asking them to discover the laws of physics on their own—though it can actually unlock “deep learning processes such as elaboration, self-explanation, and metacognitive strategies,“ the researchers say. Both sides misrepresent what teachers actually do in classrooms. Instructional models are “often combined in practice,” the researchers note, and inquiry-based learning is usually supported with direct instruction. Teachers might begin a lesson by leading a review of key concepts, for example, and then ask students to apply what they’re learning in unfamiliar contexts. Teachers already know that factual fluency and the need to struggle, flail, and even hit dead-ends are integral to learning. Teaching is fluid and complex and spools out in real time; it resists every effort to reduce it to a single strategy or program that works for all kids, in all contexts.

BRAINS THAT FIRE TOGETHER WIRE TOGETHER: In 2021, we reported that as students progressed through a college course, the learning material left neural fingerprints that mirrored brain activity in other students. A study this year using electroencephalography (EEG) largely confirms those findings. High school science teachers taught groups of young adults fitted with electrodes. Researchers found that stronger “brain synchrony” between peers predicted better academic performance. Together, these studies underscore the importance of scholarly expertise and direct instruction, but also the power of peer-to-peer and social learning. As knowledge passes from teachers to learners—some students grasp material quickly, others more slowly—an opportunity to distribute the work of learning emerges. When advanced students are paired with struggling peers, assisted by nudges from the teacher, groups of students might eventually converge around an accurate, common understanding of the material.

AI MAY CUT AN EDUCATOR’S PLANNING TIME DRAMATICALLY: Concern that the end of human teaching is one software release away is premature: Studies we’ve reviewed suggest that AI still requires a lot of fine-tuning, and in July researchers concluded that without human intervention, AI is atrocious at mathematics, performing poorly on open-ended problems and routinely flubbing even simple math calculations. To be useful, it turns out, AI may need us more than we need it.