The Most Important Education Studies of 2024

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024.

Every year the website Edutopia posts an article on the most impactful educational studies of the past year.

While some of these research studies debunk long-held educational beliefs (the subject of a recent summary), the majority of the studies affirm long-held best practices in the classrooms.

Below you’ll see validation of the following:

• While teachers want to challenge and push students, their students must experience concrete success in the classroom in order to maintain their confidence and engagement. For most of us, our confidence in learning new material is fragile.
• Spending time in class explaining how and why students answered incorrectly on assignments helps students better learn classroom content. This is further proof that most of us prefer to think concretely, not abstractly.
• AI helps students complete school work but thus far does not help students learn new material. As AI continues to evolve, teachers will need to figure out how to use it as a tool for their students yet ensure it’s not a crutch to avoid doing school work.
• Inattention contagion in a classroom is a real danger for any teacher. Keeping the inevitable class clown in check is vital!
• The Science of Reading is taking hold in more and more elementary school classrooms, but that shouldn’t squeeze out teachers bringing to life the magic and excitement of literacy. We all benefit from being read to and reading complete novels.

Joe

------

A Simple Tactic for Warm Demanders: We tend to measure academic success by the big wins: Passing a test with flying colors, for example, or earning top grades in a demanding course. But it’s the small wins that motivate students to keep going amid the inevitable academic struggles. Third and sixth graders were given 10 difficult math problems to solve, with half receiving an additional five problems that were appreciably easier—allowing students to experience a few bouts of success through the tangle of tough questions. Despite grappling with the same number of difficult problems, the students who were also given a handful of easy ones were twice as likely to look forward to solving another set of challenging problems. They were also twice as likely to rate the activity as enjoyable.

Winning the Battle For Student Attention: Researchers recruited students and gave them a special mission: Take their assigned seats in a lecture hall and quietly sabotage the attention of classmates by slouching, looking bored, and failing to take notes. Like dominoes, students sitting next to malingerers began to lose focus—formerly attentive students struggled to pay attention, wrote about half as many pages of notes, and scored nine points lower on a follow-up quiz. “Inattention contagion,” the researchers explained, “is an ecologically valid phenomenon” and “may be particularly contagious” when students are seated next to inattentive peers. Not every lesson lights up the room—there will be boredom. Your best chance to keep misbehavior and inattention at bay starts with thoughtful preparation: Make students accountable by co-creating classroom norms, set up clear classroom rules for transitions, audit your lesson instructions for clarity, design, and consider strategic placement of chatty or daydreamy kids to keep everyone on task.

AI Vaporizes Long-Term Learning: Proponents of AI chatbots in educational settings say the tools can assist in activities like brainstorming—or help students get started on tough math problems. But many teachers say their students lack the skills to improve upon what AI produces, or the maturity and self-awareness to know where the work of AI ends and their own responsibility begins. In a study, ninth, 10th, and 11th graders attended a brief math lesson, then practiced solving related problems in preparation for a quiz. Some students relied on traditional methods—sifting through their notes and textbooks to find possible answers—while others had access to a basic version of ChatGPT. Students using the basic and tutor GPTs scored higher on quizzes but when later asked to  retrieve the information their scores significantly dropped.

Take Your Students Outside: Schools have gradually reduced the amount of time students spend outside, As a result, today’s young scientists-in-training may learn about molting earthworms or flower pollination without ever studying the organisms in the wild. But outdoor activities like nature journaling—drawing trees and jotting down observations as they shed leaves, keeping a “moon journal” to track lunar phases are cost-effective antidotes to our estrangement from nature, and can be aligned with state standards in subjects as diverse as art, science, social studies, and English.

Learning to Love Academic Mistakes: Nobody likes making mistakes; students often come to fear them. But when teachers is a recent study spent time focusing on their students’ mathematical errors and engaging in collaborative discussions about common mistakes of logic or computation, teaching efficacy improved dramatically. Researchers observed hundreds of eighth graders studying for a high-stakes algebra exam. Some students prepared for the big test by attending eight sessions of explicit math instruction; others spent the same amount of time in teacher-led sessions devoted to learning from answers students got wrong. While both groups of students improved their final exam scores by about the same amount, teachers in the “learning from errors” group had invested only half the time. What made learning from errors so effective? Researchers hypothesized that teachers who dove “into the nature” of errors and worked collaboratively with students to determine “how to avert them in future” reaped the benefits of more student engagement and personal relevance.  Embracing mistakes alters the climate of the classroom, deepens relationships, and improves student motivation.

Covid’s Long Tail: Years after the pandemic’s peak, nearly 80 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers reported that newly arriving students were performing worse than their pre-pandemic peers, and faced steep deficits in emotional regulation and literacy. For early childhood teachers, that could mean more focus on classroom routines and student self-regulation.

A Modest Mental Health Turnaround: For nearly a decade, the erosion of teen mental health showed no signs of slowing. As the years ticked by, more and more students struggled with despair, turbulent thoughts, and suicide—enough to force the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare a national emergency. But the latest CDC data suggests that we may finally be reaching a turning point. After a prolonged rise in the percentage of students feeling persistently sad or hopeless—peaking at 42 percent in 2021, that number modestly ticked back down to 40 percent in 2023.

The ‘Science of Reading’ Meets Real Children: Foundational reading skills like phonemic awareness play a crucial role in helping students learn how to read, but not every child needs the same amount of help. A recent study discovered an “optimal cumulative dosage” of 10.2 hours, a finding that held for students at risk for reading disabilities, while cautioning that “our findings should not be used to dictate an oversimplified prescription regarding dosage.” More isn’t always better—and overemphasizing parts of any reading program can result in a suboptimal allocation of time for promoting reading achievement. “The science of reading is not settled,” the prominent scholars of literacy Robert Tierney and P. David Pearson wrote in a recent report, noting that “phonics-first approaches were lively and controversial matters” as far back as the 1960s. In the decades since, claims of a reading crisis have routinely surfaced in an effort to “justify a purging of past practices.” But phonics is just one crucial piece of the reading puzzle—which must eventually be applied to authentic reading materials such as books and short stories, as “a regular part of the reading diet” that involves more advanced skills like comprehension, prediction, vocabulary, and sustained attention.