8 Pieces of New Research Driving My Upcoming Book
When I set out to write Meaningful & Relevant: Engaging Learners in an Age of Distraction, I took a deep dive into a lot of the current research around learning. From 2019-2022 there were some landmark studies that came out. Not all of them were "new findings" but many shed light on areas that were working...and failing...in our current schooling experience.
In the new book, I share plenty of studies that support the need for meaningful and relevant learning experiences. Here are 10 that form that foundation:
Students Think Lectures Are Best, But Research Suggests They’re Wrong: Learners don’t always have the right perception of learning (and there is a strong anticorrelation between their perception and achievement).
Shared techniques of expert teachers for classroom management focus on proactive strategies: 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".
Power of the "Pause" Button: "When teaching students foundational concepts, a video lesson equipped with a simple pause button, for example, may allow students to reset cognitively as they reach their attentional limits, a 2022 study concluded. Pause buttons, like rewind buttons, are also crucial for learners who encounter “complex learning materials,” have “low prior knowledge,” or exhibit “low working memory capacities.”
PBL for All - It works for all students in so many different situations: "Now two new large-scale studies—encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students. In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia, 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.
A Better Approach to Becoming a Better School: "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".
Teaching is one of the best ways to demonstrate 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 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent 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."
Generating Questions is Better Than Most Study Strategies: 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 an average of 14 percentage points 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.
Extrinsic Rewards Don't Work: "We compared the long-term effects of generating questions by learners with answering questions (i.e., testing) and restudying in the context of a university lecture. In contrast to previous studies, students were not prepared for the learning strategies, learning content was experimentally controlled, and effects on factual and transfer knowledge were examined. Students' overall recall performance after one week profited from generating questions and testing but not from restudying. When analyzing the effects on both knowledge types separately, traditional analyses revealed that only factual knowledge appeared to benefit from testing. However, additional Bayesian analyses suggested that generating questions and testing similarly benefit factual and transfer knowledge compared with restudying. The generation of questions thus seems to be another powerful learning strategy, yielding similar effects as testing on long-term retention of coherent learning content in educational contexts, and these effects emerge for factual and transfer knowledge."
A big shout out to Edutopia for continually finding and highlighting great research and studies over the years!
