The 10 Most Significant Educational Studies of 2020

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Educational Studies of 2020

I only included 7 of the studies—you can click the link above for the other three that don’t apply greatly to Trinity or early childhood/elementary educational practices.

To me, what’s particularly gratifying is the studies affirm the ongoing programmatic and pedagogical work we do at Trinity. While there is art to great teaching, Trinity utilizes teaching practices whose evidence is demonstration of student learning and understanding.

Our school mantra is to cherish childhood as we simultaneously prepare our students for the future by shaping a strong academic and character foundation (the four Cs of Cognition, Character, Continued Curiosity, and Cultivating Confidence).

You’ll see proof below of what we’ve been focusing on:

• Importance of stimulating multimodalities (including handwriting) to reinforce content in long-term memory and ease of retrieval
• The very limited connection of standardized testing results with student success in the classroom
• The benefits (for both teacher and students) of proactive clarity about what is going to be learned and then assessed
• How student engagement aids in learning
• Why Lucy Calkins’ three cueing is not sound pedagogy
• Why deep, rich content is so important (the subject of some earlier article summaries).

Obviously, we’ve all been consumed by the black hole of Covid-19 for the past 10 months, yet this week’s article is a reminder of the bigger aspects of education and, more importantly, that Trinity, as always, remains in sync with current educational research!

Joe

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TO TEACH VOCABULARY, LET KIDS BE THESPIANS: When students are learning a new language, ask them to act out vocabulary words. It’s fun to unleash a child’s inner thespian, of course, but a 2020 study concluded that it also nearly doubles their ability to remember the words months later. It’s a simple reminder that if you want students to remember something, encourage them to learn it in a variety of ways—by drawing it, acting it out, or pairing it with relevant images, for example.

NEUROSCIENTISTS DEFEND THE VALUE OF TEACHING HANDWRITING—AGAIN: For most kids, typing just doesn’t cut it. In 2012, brain scans of preliterate children revealed crucial reading circuitry flickering to life when kids hand-printed letters and then tried to read them. Also, a team of researchers studied seventh graders while they handwrote, drew, and typed words, and concluded that handwriting and drawing produced telltale neural tracings indicative of deeper learning. Whenever self-generated movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated. It also appears that the movements related to keyboard typing do not activate these networks the same way that drawing and handwriting do.

All kids still need to develop digital skills, and there’s evidence that technology helps children with dyslexia to overcome obstacles like note-taking or illegible handwriting.

THE ACT TEST JUST GOT A NEGATIVE SCORE (FACE PALM): A 2020 study found that ACT test scores, which are often a key factor in college admissions, showed a weak—or even negative—relationship when it came to predicting how successful students would be in college. Often students with very high ACT scores—but indifferent high school grades—flame out in college, overmatched by the rigors of a university’s academic schedule. In a similar study about SAT scores, researchers found that high school grades were stronger predictors of four-year-college graduation than SAT scores. The reason? Four-year high school grades, the researchers asserted, are a better indicator of crucial skills like perseverance, time management, and the ability to avoid distractions.

A RUBRIC REDUCES RACIAL GRADING BIAS: A simple step might help undercut the pernicious effect of grading bias: Articulate your standards clearly before you begin grading, and refer to the standards regularly during the assessment process. When grading criteria are vague, implicit stereotypes can insidiously “fill in the blanks.” But when teachers have an explicit set of criteria to evaluate the writing—asking whether the student “provides a well-elaborated recount of an event,” for example—the difference in grades is nearly eliminated.

STUDENTS WHO GENERATE GOOD QUESTIONS ARE BETTER LEARNERS: Some of the most popular study strategies—highlighting passages, rereading notes, and underlining key sentences—are also among the least effective. A 2020 study highlighted a powerful alternative: Get students to generate questions about their learning, and gradually press them to ask more probing questions. In the study, students who studied a topic and then generated their own questions scored higher on a test than students who used passive strategies like studying their notes and rereading classroom material. Creating questions, the researchers found, not only encouraged students to think more deeply about the topic but also strengthened their ability to remember what they were studying.

DID A 2020 STUDY JUST END THE ‘READING WARS’?: Lucy Calkins Unit of Study was dealt a severe blow when a panel of reading experts concluded that it “would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The study found that the program failed to explicitly and systematically teach young readers how to decode and encode written words, and was thus “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.” The study sounded the death knell for practices that de-emphasize phonics in favor of having children use multiple sources of information—like story events or illustrations—to predict the meaning of unfamiliar words, an approach often associated with “balanced literacy.” Calkins seemed to concede the point, writing that “aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing.’”

RESEARCHERS CAST DOUBT ON READING TASKS LIKE ‘FINDING THE MAIN IDEA’: “Content is comprehension,” declared a 2020 Fordham Institute study, sounding a note of defiance as it staked out a position in the ongoing debate over the teaching of intrinsic reading skills versus the teaching of content knowledge. Exposing kids to rich content in civics, history, and social studies appeared to teach reading more effectively than our current methods of teaching reading. According to Natalie Wexler, the author of the well-received 2019 book The Knowledge Gap, content knowledge and reading are intertwined. “Students with more background knowledge have a better chance of understanding whatever text they encounter. They’re able to retrieve more information about the topic from long-term memory, leaving more space in working memory for comprehension,” she recently told Edutopia.