Top Education Studies in 2022

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2022.

Edutopia annually compiles the most important educational research studies from the previous year. What I always take away from the summary is that Trinity stays on top of and has implemented most if not all of these research studies, which often validate—although sometimes refute—best practices in education.

Here’s a quick summary of the 2022 studies:

Similar to last week’s summary, research supports how important it is for teachers to develop strong relationships with their students and to demonstrate care and concern for their students in order foster student confidence to push and challenge themselves academically. It’s an example of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: physical and emotional safety precedes learning.

Learning (the ability to retain, retrieve, and transfer information) is supported through graphic organizers and sketchnotes as these tools help students be more active participants in the process of learning. Similarly, while textbook highlighting is inefficient overall, it remains a common strategy and thus its proper use needs to be explicitly taught to students.  

Periodic brain breaks (particularly physical activity) benefit student learning and focus. Cramming for a big exam is ineffective compared to spread-out retrieval practice. Our high school teachers knew what they were talking about when they advised us to review our notes nightly.

For those of you (like me) who always feel inadequate decorating bulletin boards, a research study warns teachers of making their classroom too cluttered in order to minimize possible student distractions.

And as always, the benefits of play-based learning in the younger grades and a multi-sensory approach to teaching literacy skills is validated by current research. 

Joe

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THERE’S NO CONFLICT BETWEEN RELATIONSHIPS AND RIGOR: Observers sometimes assume that teachers who radiate empathy, kindness, and openness are “soft” and can be taken advantage of by students. But new research shows that when you signal that you care about kids, they’re willing to go the extra mile—giving you the flexibility to assign more challenging school work. The researchers found that the most effective teachers build their classrooms by getting to know their students, being approachable, and showing that they enjoy the work, and then deftly translate emotional capital into academic capital. “When students feel teachers care about them, they work harder, engage in more challenging academic activities, behave more appropriately for the school environment, are genuinely happy to see their teacher, and meet or exceed their teacher’s expectations,” the researchers conclude.

HIGHLIGHTING ISN’T VERY EFFECTIVE, UNTIL TEACHERS STEP IN: Students often highlight the wrong information and may rely on their deficient highlighting skills as a primary study strategy, leading to poor learning outcomes. The researchers determined that “learner-generated highlighting” tended to improve retention of material, but not comprehension. When students were taught proper highlighting techniques by teachers, however—for example, how to distinguish main ideas from supporting ideas—they dramatically improved their academic performance. Crucially, “when highlighting is used in conjunction with another learning strategy” like “graphic organizers or post-questions,” its effectiveness soars.The need for explicit teaching may be linked to changing reading habits as students graduate from stories and fables to expository texts, which require them to navigate unfamiliar text formats. To bring kids up to speed, show them “examples of appropriate and inappropriate highlighting,” teach them to “highlight content relatively sparingly,” and provide examples of follow-on tactics like summarizing their insights to drive deeper comprehension.

SKETCHNOTES AND CONCEPT MAPS WORK—EVEN BETTER THAN YOU MIGHT THINK: Simple concept maps, sketchnotes, and other annotated jottings—akin to doodling with a purpose—can facilitate deeper comprehension of materials than more polished drawings. Representational drawings, such as a simple diagram of a cell, may help students remember factual information, but they “lack features to make generalizations or inferences based on that information.” Organizational drawings that link concepts with arrows, annotations, and other relational markings give students a clearer sense of “the big picture,” allow them to visualize how ideas are connected, and provide a method for spotting obvious gaps in their understanding. On tests of higher-order thinking, fifth graders who made organizational drawings outperformed their peers who tried representational drawings by 300 percent. To reap the benefits in class, have students start with simple diagrams to help remember the material, and then move them up to sketchnotes and concept maps ask they tease out connections to prior knowledge.

BRAIN BREAKS ARE MISUNDERSTOOD (AND UNDERUTILIZED): Conventional wisdom holds that the development of a skill comes from active, repeated practice: But recent studies reveal that the intervals between practice sessions are at least as crucial. Brain breaks play "just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill.” The kinds of breaks make a difference, too. One study compared in-classroom breaks like drawing or building puzzles to outdoor breaks like running or playing in sandboxes. In a nod to the power of movement—and free time—it was the kids playing outside who returned to class ready to learn, probably because indoor games, like indoor voices, required children to engage in more self-regulation. Depriving kids of downtime, it turns out, is a threat to the whole proposition of learning. To commit lessons to memory, the brain demands its own time—which it sets aside to clean up and consolidate new material.

ON CLASSROOM DESIGN, AN ARGUMENT FOR CAUTION—AND COMMON SENSE: When it comes time to decorate their classrooms, teachers often find themselves on the horns of a dilemma: Should they aim for Pinterest-worthy interior design, or opt for blank walls on the strength of research that emphasizes the risks of distracting students? A study published in February this year argues for minimalism. Researchers tracked the on-task behavior of K-2 students and concluded that visually ”streamlined” classrooms produced more focused students than “decorated” ones. During short read-alouds about topics like rainbows and plate tectonics, for example, young kids in classrooms free of “charts, posters, and manipulatives” were paying attention at significantly higher rates. But it might not be a simple question of more or less. A 2014 study confirmed that posters of women scientists or diverse historical figures, for example, can improve students’ sense of belonging. And a recent study that observed 3,766 children in 153 schools concluded that classrooms that occupied a visual middle ground—neither too cluttered nor too austere—produced the best academic outcomes. The rules appear to be relatively straightforward: Hang academically relevant, supportive work on the walls, and avoid the extremes—working within the broad constraints suggested by common sense and moderation.

FOR YOUNG CHILDREN, THE POWER OF PLAY-BASED LEARNING: Children aren’t miniature adults, but a bias toward adult perspectives of childhood, with its attendant schedules and routines, has gradually exerted a stranglehold on our educational system nonetheless, suggests the author and early childhood educator Erika Christakis. How can we let little kids be little while meeting the academic expectations of typical schools? Play gently guided by adults, often called play-based learning, can satisfy both objectives. Teachers of young students can have a “learning goal” in mind, but true play-based learning should incorporate wonder and exploration, be child-led when possible, and give students “freedom and choice over their actions and play behavior.” Interrupt the flow of learning only when necessary: gently nudge students who might find activities too hard or too easy for example. The playful approach improved early math and task switching skills, compared to more traditional tactics that emphasize the explicit acquisition of skills. To get it right, focus on relationships and ask questions that prompt wonder. “Rich, open-ended conversation is critical,” and children need time ”to converse with each other playfully, to tell a rambling story to an adult, to listen to high-quality literature and ask meaningful questions.”

A BETTER WAY TO LEARN YOUR ABCS: Getting young kids to match a letter to its corresponding sound is a first-order reading skill. To help students grasp that the letter c makes the plosive “cuh” sound in “car,” teachers often use pictures as scaffolds, or have children write the letter repeatedly while making its sound. Sound-letter pairs are learned much more effectively when whole-body movements are integrated into lessons. Five- and 6-year-olds in the study spent eight weeks practicing movements for each letter of the alphabet, slithering like a snake as they hissed the sibilant “sss” sound, for example. The researchers found that whole-body movement improved students’ ability to recall letter-sound pairings, and doubled their ability to recognize hard-to-learn sounds—such as the difference between the sounds c makes in “cat” and “sauce”—when compared to students who simply wrote and spoke letter-sound pairings at their desks. The approach can make a big difference in the acquisition of a life-changing skill. Educators should “incorporate movement-based teaching” into their curricula, giving special consideration to “whole-body movement,” the researchers conclude.

AN AUTHORITATIVE STUDY OF TWO HIGH-IMPACT LEARNING STRATEGIES: Spacing and retrieval practices are two of the most effective ways to drive long-term retention and students should know how and why the strategies are effective. Researchers explain that students who prefer techniques like reading and re-reading material in intense cram sessions are bound to fail. Instead, students should think of learning as a kind of “fitness routine” during which they practice recalling the material from memory and space out their learning sessions over time. Teaching kids to self-quiz or summarize from memory—and then try it again—are the crucial first steps in disabusing students of their “false beliefs about learning.”