The Most Important Education Studies of 2021

This week's article summary is The Most Important Education Studies of 2021.

As you read the summaries of the top studies from last year, you’ll see much validation of what and how we teach at Trinity. A significant attribute of our school is how open we are to research on how children best learn. 

Some commonalities among the studies:

• Metacognition techniques help students learn better: Whether it’s through project-based learning where kids discover skills and concepts from trial and error or students taking a pretest before a unit, learning is aided when students are cognitively active and aware of what and why they are learning something.
• A trusting, safe, relationship-based classroom precedes academic performance: Be it classroom management consistency or a classroom culture of effort and persistence, a classroom needs to be a warm, supportive, predictable environment for students in order to optimize learning.
• Parents, by and large, do not respond favorably to the term ‘social-emotional development’ or to other similarly non-academic terms like ‘soft skills’, including ‘growth mindset’:  As teachers, we recognize the critical importance of helping students develop executive functioning skills like self-evaluation, resilience, planning, and, self-regulation; yet a number of studies below concluded that parents still want schools to develop their children academically.  Hence they need to hear how social-emotional skills support academic achievement. The more schools can directly link social-emotional learning to academic success, the more parents will support it.

 Joe

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WHAT PARENTS FEAR ABOUT SEL (AND HOW TO CHANGE THEIR MINDS): When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases with social emotional learning, nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings. Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.” But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

THE SECRET MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES OF EXPERT TEACHERS: In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic. That’s no accident, according to new research. While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations. Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

THE SURPRISING POWER OF PRETESTING: Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing. But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 50% on a follow-up test. The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material. Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

A FULLER PICTURE OF WHAT A ‘GOOD’ SCHOOL IS: It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020. That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found. The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores. The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure and may only materialize well into the future.

TEACHING IS LEARNING: One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick? In a  2021 study, researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student. The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading. The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9% higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24% higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

A DISTURBING STRAIN OF BIAS IN KIDS’ BOOKS: Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research. Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender. Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. When adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter. Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard. Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

THE NEVER-ENDING ‘PAPER VERSUS DIGITAL’ WAR: The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and tactility that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable. But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge. Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers. We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

NEW RESEARCH MAKES A POWERFUL CASE FOR PBL: Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies. Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms. Now two new large-scale studies provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students. In the studies, elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.