Google Scholar Labs is a major new AI interface for Google Scholar that launched in late November 2025.

Instead of using key terms to search academic studies, Scholar Labs lets teachers, academics, and their students ask research-related questions such as, “What are some recent research papers about mindset?" Google Scholar Labs then finds relevant research studies and summarizes.

Experimenting with the tool, I was struck by its speed and convenience. It’s a quick way to get a broad overview of any research topic, and while it doesn’t replace a more traditional research search, it can definitely help with one. It also furthers Google Scholar’s mission of making academic research more accessible overall.

What is Google Scholar Labs?

Scholar Labs is an AI-powered search tool designed to assist users in searching Google Scholar, Google’s search engine for scholarly resources such as research papers.

The tool's purpose is to simplify the process of finding relevant research. As such, it’s a useful tool both for seasoned academics and newbie researchers.

To use Scholar Labs, go to scholar.google.com/scholar_labs and then type in a search query. For instance, you can ask it to summarize all the recent research on flipped learning and whether it impacts student achievement. Within a few moments, you’ll get a type-annotated bibliography with links to various research papers on the topic and summaries of these papers.

How Well Does Google Scholar Labs Work?

Scholar Labs works as advertised. Despite some limitations, I found it to be great at providing a quick snapshot of research into a topic without requiring me to spend a lot of time searching.

For instance, in the example I gave above about mindset research, it provided me with 10 or so pieces of research on the topic that quickly let me know there are a good deal of questions around whether growth mindset is really as linked to student achievement as many educators believe. The tool led me more quickly to this takeaway than a traditional Google Scholar search might. I got similarly helpful results on queries about flipped learning and other topics.

You can also use Scholar Labs to compare and contrast different interventions, such as flipped learning vs. traditional classroom settings. In addition, you can get specific about the types of research you want it to include in its search summary with instructions such as, “include only randomized control trials.”

Despite all these great features, Google Scholar Labs is not perfect. By default, it tends to include a lot of old research, and can miss important studies. So while it provides a quick overview of research, it’s not a replacement for a deep dive on a topic.

Additionally, the tool is less a chatbot and more the Google Scholar version of Google Search’s AI summary tool. So your queries should be framed as questions, and it struggles to do more than provide broad research summaries.

When I asked it to find the first study linking Growth Mindset to education, it provided me with another summary of research into Growth Mindset’s impact on learning overall. This was not at all what I asked for.

Despite these minor drawbacks I find myself using the tool more and more as a starting point for my research.

How Can Teachers Use It?

Teachers can use Google Scholar Labs for quick overviews of pedagogical research and for research related to the subject matters they teach, as well as with students, provided such use is in accordance with their institution's data privacy and AI policies.

I plan on recommending it to my graduate students who are working on research. It’s the rare AI tool that is relatively free of drawbacks, provided students don’t over-rely on it and use it in addition to, rather than instead of, more traditional research methods.

Bottom line: Is Google Scholar Labs Helpful for Education?

Google Scholar Labs is an easy-to-use new AI tool that makes research more efficient, effective, and therefore accessible.

If you can’t tell already, I’m a big fan of Scholar Labs.

The impact of screen time on children continues to be an important and closely watched topic for educators and parents. Many currently believe that excessive use of screens, from iPads to phones, laptops, and TVs, have facilitated mental health problems in children across the globe. But research has also demonstrated that it is precisely those children who are more at-risk who tend to turn toward screens as a coping mechanism. In other words, it’s the chicken or egg problem: Which came first, screen use or negative mental health?

A recent study looking at the social-emotional impact of screen time on children was designed to provide the most comprehensive answer to that question. In a review of 132 previous studies involving tens of thousands kids, researchers found that excessive screen use was linked to social-emotional problems and that social-emotional problems also led to more screen use. However, moderate amounts of screen time had minimal impacts.

Meanwhile, using screens for gaming was associated with significantly more negative mental health outcomes, says Michael Noetel, one of the study's authors and a professor at The University of Queensland in Australia.

How Was This Review Designed

For this analysis, Noetel and his fellow researchers only included longitudinal studies—studies that follow the same group of participants over extended periods of time. This contrasts with many studies that examine screen time, which are often cross-sectional studies that only look at data from people at one specific point in time.

“Cross-sectional studies are snapshots—they might show heavy screen users have more problems, but we can't tell what came first,” Noetel says. “Maybe anxious kids just like screens more? Our longitudinal studies followed the same kids for years. We could see that kids using screens at age 5 had more problems by age 7, even after accounting for their problems at age 5. That's much stronger evidence that screens actually cause problems, not just that troubled kids like screens.”

He adds, “When you track 300,000 kids over time and see the same patterns everywhere, that's about the best evidence we can get without randomly banning screens for thousands of children.”

What Are The Biggest Takeaways For Parents And Educators?

Screen time guidelines for children often recommend less than 1 hour of screen time per day for young kids, and under 2 hours a day for older children. If you stick to these guidelines, risks are minimal, Noetel says. He describes the risk around various amounts of screen time as follows:

• "Under guidelines: Almost zero increased risk. Like having one biscuit versus two—no meaningful difference."
• "At the guideline limit: Still pretty safe. The problems are minimal."
• “Exceeding guidelines—3+ hours—the risk increases noticeably. Each extra hour likely means less sleep, less play, or less family time."
• “4+ hours daily: This is where we see real problems emerging. Kids in this range showed meaningfully higher anxiety, aggression, and attention problems.”

Noetel adds that you can think of screen time like a soft drink. “One glass won't hurt. Two is pushing it. By the third or fourth glass daily, you're looking at real health impacts that build over time,” he says.

Additionally, gaming changes this equation. “Even moderate gaming—1-2 hours—showed stronger links to problems than 3-4 hours of TV.”

What Is Most Surprising About This Research?

Noetel says he was not expecting to see such a negative impact from gaming.

“I'd just bought my kids a Nintendo Switch, hoping games would teach my kids problem-solving. But gaming stood out as particularly risky, much worse than other screen activities,” he says.

He's also surprised by the two-way connection between screens and emotional problems.

“We always hear screens damage kids. We rarely hear that damaged kids seek out screens. It's a vicious cycle that feeds itself,” he says.

What About Educational Screen Use?

“Unfortunately, we couldn't properly test educational content on its own. While six studies looked at educational screen use, they weren't reported in a way we could separate out for analysis,” Noetel says. “Most studies lumped all screen types together.

He adds, "What we can say is that when screens were used for 'general purposes,' (which includes some educational use), the effects were much weaker than gaming. The negative effect for general screen use was small.”

In addition, previous research suggests educational content—especially programs targeting literacy or numeracy—can actually have benefits. But the team couldn't isolate those effects in their meta-analysis.

A previous study by Noetel and his colleagues suggested “screens for education are fine, and probably very good.”

How Has This Research Impacted Noetel as a Parent?

“I've got three kids under seven, so this research hit home,” Noetel says. “We removed Netflix from the smart TVs and only kept our public broadcaster, which is a bit tamer and more educational. We dropped YouTube from their tablets and kept just educational games.”

He adds, “We only play the Switch together or watch Netflix movies as a family. When screens are shared, they're less likely to become a problem. It turns screen time into family time.”

Other Advice For Parents

“Parents get told to cut screen time but rarely get tools to handle the emotional problems driving it,” Noetel says. “Programs like Triple P can help families build those skills.”

Although the idea of cutting screen time can be daunting, understanding the impact is the first step.

“The most important thing: this isn't about perfection. No parent gets it right all the time," he adds. "But understanding that screens and emotions are connected—that excessive use might be a symptom, not just a cause—that changes how we help our kids. We don't need to ban screens. We need to help kids handle their emotions better, so they don't need screens as a crutch.”

• The Screen Inferiority Effect: How Screens Affect Reading Comprehension
• Implementing School Cell Phone Bans

Recent research from MIT scientists compared the brain activity of students who used ChatGPT when writing to those who did not. The team's findings suggest that using ChatGPT resulted in less brain activity and inferior writing for students.

The results were published with the provocative title ”Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task” in preprint form, meaning these have not been peer-reviewed or officially published by a scientific journal. Even so, the study has garnered a great deal of attention in the education world and beyond with write-ups about it appearing in Time Magazine, Psychology Today, and elsewhere.

All this coverage has led to some misconceptions and exaggerations about its findings, says Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces group and lead author of the study.

“We didn't find any brain rot,” Kosmyna says. “Some people thought it was IQ measurement or something like that, but we didn’t measure IQ in our study.”

Kosmyna explains exactly how the study was conducted, what it found, what its implications are for education, as well as its limitations and some of the pressing questions related to it, that require more research.

What Did The Your Brain On ChatGPT Study Find?

Researchers split 54 study participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 39, into three groups and had them write a short paper. Participants in one group were placed in a large language model (LLM) group and asked to use ChatGPT for help. The second group could use a search engine, while the third group had to write their essays without the use of external tools.

Participants’ brain activity was studied with EEG devices and the results did not paint a flattering picture of AI use. The researchers measured brain connectivity, essentially communication happening between different regions of the brain, Kosmyna says, adding, “The ChatGPT group had the least brain connectivity.”

This is not necessarily surprising, given that we intuitively notice that actually writing a paper ourselves takes more mental effort than copying and pasting info from an AI chatbot. But the cognitive impact seemed to extend beyond the initial experience.

For the conclusion of the experiment, those who were initially in the LLM group were asked to write the essay without help—these participants still exhibited less brain connectivity than participants who had never interacted with the LLM in the study.

If this result holds up in further research, it could have major impacts for when and how AI tools are introduced in the classroom.

“The timing might be absolutely critical when you introduce the tools,” Kosmyna says. She adds that it could make sense for educators to have students learn a skill such as essay writing without the use of AI, and then introduce AI as a tool later once students have achieved a certain level of mastery.

What Does This All Mean In Real-World Settings?

These results should be interpreted with some caution, as judging the implications of brain activity is notoriously difficult, and some education studies in the past have been criticized for making overly broad claims based upon brain scans.

The MIT team also assessed student output by having two human writing teachers score all the papers written for the study.

“They did not know that those participants were from an LLM group, but they called essays from the LLM participants ‘soulless,’ that’s a direct quote,” says Kosmyna.

The papers submitted by LLM participants also exhibited less stylistic and word choice diversity, and were considered average by the human graders, who also wondered if they had been written by the same student.

Because of the way AI is being integrated at all levels of society with what Kosmyna says is “unprecedented speed,” she believes educators should push for research into the impact of AI use in their students, both from researchers at institutions such as MIT, but also in their own districts and settings.

“Nothing prevents a school from providing a class with an LLM and then having [the same] class without an LLM, and just comparing the results,” she says.

Where Is More Research Needed?

This research only looked at a limited population from a similar demographic. It also only looked at the impact of ChatGPT on a specific skill, writing.

Kosmyna has completed follow-up research that looks at how ChatGPT impacts brain activity and quality when students engage in a coding and programming activity. Though the study has not been published yet, she says it trends in the same direction but with variation. "Of course, they are different because the nature of the task is very different here,” she adds.

Future research into AI use needs to look at its influence on extended use and among different age groups, particularly teenagers and children.

“I would say it is almost critical to do it on younger teenagers and on children, on minors,” Kosmyna says. “The brain that just starts to learn is potentially in bigger danger.”

• AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): What Teachers Need To Know
• Do ChatGPT-Style AI ChatBots Help Students Learn? Yes, But There Are Caveats, Says Research

Many of us grew up hearing that watching TV “rots the brain,” but that sentiment has never applied to Sesame Street. In fact, research shows that simply watching Sesame Street helps kids learn in a variety of ways, from increasing literacy and knowledge of math concepts to school readiness and emotional learning. In some instances, the positive impact of watching Sesame Street on children matched much more costly and resource-consuming interventions for young learners.

The beloved children’s show is made by the nonprofit Sesame Workshop and launched in 1969. Sesame Street’s future was recently uncertain when the streaming service Max announced it wouldn’t renew its contract with the show last December. Netflix, however, has stepped in to save Sesame Street, with a deal that will see new episodes debuting on Netflix as well as PBS and PBS Kids.

In anticipation of the show coming to Netflix, I thought it would be a good time to examine its educational impact. To that end, I spoke with Marie-Louise Mares, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Steven Holiday, an advertising professor at the University of Alabama. Both have studied the impact of Sesame Street on children and their education and provide a closer look at the science of Sesame Street.

The Science of Sesame Street: How The Show Teaches Kids

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street and other shows, built educational science into Sesame Street’s DNA.

“Right from the word 'go,' they involved educational scientists,” Mares says. “There's always been both formative research, where the writers and educational psychologists and so on are kind of generating scripts and plans, and are doing this kind of rapid cycle pre-testing.”

The show’s creators have also done summative research to evaluate the effectiveness of the show, and in so doing, better understand how children learn overall. That includes assessing and thinking about aspects such as the length of segments and presenting the same lesson in varied ways.

“It's considered really effective, in part because they're willing to tweak it and alter it based on the sort of feedback they're getting from the kids and evaluations of the kids,” Mares says.

Using Advertising Strategies to "Sell" Kids Kids Learning

Holiday has researched how Sesame Street uses Madison Avenue sales techniques to “sell” learning to children. Sesame Street has a magazine format and features commercial-like segments that teach kids about reading or math. This is by design, Holiday says, noting that the show’s original creators knew that commercial breaks actually help sustain interest.

“They hired somebody who was from the advertising world and said, ‘Hey, make these actual commercials that are structured like commercials that are going to sell something to kids. Let's sell them letters and numbers,'” he says.

Good educators often take this type of advertising approach naturally, and Holiday’s research found that Joan Ganz Cooney, a co-creator of Sesame Street, believed Madison Avenue sales people had actually stolen many of their best sales techniques from effective teachers.

Whatever the origins, Holiday believes using advertising strategies to educate children could be better harnessed overall, including from app developers.

The Educational Impact of Sesame Street

Watching Sesame Street has repeatedly been associated with positive outcomes in children and for such things as early school readiness.

In 2013, Mares was the lead author on a meta-analysis of 24 studies conducted with 10,000 children in 15 countries. This study found that watching Sesame Street was associated with significant positive learning outcomes, including literacy and numeracy, learning about the world, health and safety knowledge, social reasoning, and attitudes toward out-groups. Overall, Mares research suggests that children who were scoring in the 50th percentile on tests before viewing the show could be predicted to score in the 60th percentile after viewing it.

The positive gains associated with watching Sesame Street that Mares observed were similar to other interventions, including nutrition programs and pre-K classes.

“[The effect sizes] are kind of on the upper end of small by some metrics,” Mares says. “But when you compare them to other kind of attempts to intervene in cognitive learning outcomes or emotional outcomes with kids in similar countries, it's along the lines of many of those other interventions, and those other interventions are often much more difficult to have reach and scale, because they're often in-person, and evolve giving money, giving food, etc, having preschools, and so on.”

Other research has found similarly positive effects.

Getting The Most Out of Sesame Street and Other Educational Shows

To maximize the educational impact of watching Sesame Street, both Holiday and Mares say the best thing a parent or caretaker can do is watch the show with their child, though they acknowledge that isn’t always possible.

Even just listening in and talking about the concepts with your child later can help, Mares says. She adds that in her research with parents of young kids, they often tell her that shows such as Sesame Street or Daniel Tiger are most helpful when they reflect back on it as similar situations occur in real life.

"Daniel Tiger often has these kinds of lessons about how to handle reading or washing your hands after you've used the potty, or whatever it may be,” Mares says. So if a child is getting upset, a parent might ask them what Daniel does, and remind them to “take a deep breath and count to four.”

Holiday says parents should make sure to ask their kids questions about the show, ideally as they’re watching it but also later.

“The parental co-viewing and communication, where you're there with them, and you see the content and you have them think through the content, will amplify that learning,” he says.

The Sesame Learning Channel, available exclusively through Discovery Education, offers ready-to-use early childhood resources for educators, including to support whole-child success in foundational math skills, language and literacy skills, and health and wellbeing, with lesson plans, embedded educator support tips, micro-PL videos, family supports, and more.

• AI-Assisted Characters Help Students Learn From TV, According to Harvard-Led Research
• Gamification: Pros and Some Cons, According to Research

JSTOR is a resource website that it says offers a place for anyone to "explore the world's knowledge, cultures, and ideas."

This is a huge resource of journals, books, images, primary sources, and more. Crucially, it's all available mostly for free and uses dynamic search functionality to help you find what's needed.

The idea here is to offer teachers and students a greater depth to research and projects thanks to the primary sources available. This represents a fantastic way for students to learn how to discover their own path and cite for work, all of which should lead to more original end results.

This guide aims to explain all you need to know about JSTOR for your class.

What is JSTOR?

JSTOR is a website that houses an expanse of primary sources for use in projects, essays, papers, and beyond.

This repository houses all these useful documents and images in a well-arranged fashion, much like a library. This allows for deep dive searching to find just what's needed, and with all the proper references for citation, too.

While this can be a useful place to visit in search of a specific paper or essay, it's also possible to browse using categories like collections in order to discover new avenues of potential learning.

Nearly all the journals featured are peer-reviewed. Although there are items that are far older than today's standard of peer reviews, which is worth keeping in mind.

How does JSTOR work?

JSTOR offers access to older archived materials, and as such, is well-arranged for easy search access. You can login and have features such as saving items, or you can dive right into the search bar to hunt down what you're after, without being a member.

Use the basic search or access the advanced version to search with more specifics in mind. These include narrowing to certain article types, languages, publication dates, ISBN number, and more.

You can also use a journal filter to narrow down the search for specific areas, such as Art & Art History, for example -- where the number of titles in that section are shown in brackets.

What are the best JSTOR features?

JSTOR uses advanced and simple search options to make everything highly accessible to everyone. While the advanced version can be helpful for students and teachers seeking specific journals, the simpler version is a great way for younger students to start using the service.

The platform also offers a section aimed at educators with resources to help enhance teaching. These include a resource library, webinars on specific areas, real-world teaching tools, reports about faculty, lesson plans, video recordings, and more.

It also has a community that educators can join to share and learn with others, all aimed at helping boost student engagement.

At time of publishing there are more than 100,000 ebooks, 2,800 top scholarly journals, over 50,000 open research reports, 2+ million images, and more than 2 million primary sources.

The service also offers DfR, Data for Research, which is a text-mining program for text analysis and digital humanities research.

How much does JSTOR cost?

JSTOR is a not-for-profit that offers content totally free up to 100 articles per month with no adverts. You don't need to sign up with any personal details to get accessing everything right away, however, if you plan on using it extensively, you need to create a personal account, which is limited to 100 articles per month. More information is available here.

JSTOR best tips and tricks

Group up
Have students work in groups to seek specific papers and quotes you have directed them toward, so they understand how to use the search.

Use the resources
Take the lesson plans, images, real-world teaching materials, and more, and integrate it all into your teaching plans for richer lessons.

Keep up
Join the community and see the developments and new ways to engage students as and when they develop, with you as a part of it all.

• New Teacher Starter Kit
• Best Tools for Teachers

Scite is an AI-powered academic research tool that is designed to make the process of finding, evaluating and understanding sources easier, and does an excellent job at all three of those.

I first reviewed Scite back in 2025 and recently revisited the tool. Once again, I was left thoroughly impressed with it. Scite will summarize research on a given question, for instance, does flipped learning improve student grades? It also lets you know how much a given paper has been cited and whether that citation was favorable or not, which lets you know whether the paper is being taken seriously in the field.

Additionally, it has a great feature that lets you ask questions about the research. This can help you understand the research or quickly learn if it has something you are missing.

Altogether, Scite is designed to do what I think all the best AI tools do, help humans conduct their own research and thinking.

Here’s a closer look at Scite’s capabilities and what I thought of them.

What Is Scite and How Does It Work?

Scite works like a beefed-up AI-powered academic search engine and research-oriented chatbot. In addition to summarizing research, you can ask questions about a given paper. Unlike too many AI tools, it doesn’t try to do too much. Instead of providing a full summary of each paper that seeks to replace reading the paper, it tends to tell you about the paper, so you can decide for yourself if it’s useful. This is a refreshing approach.

I asked it “Can you summarize research on the use of AI chatbots as tutors in education?” With a minute or two, it provided an accurate overview of the current research into this topic with citations linking to the latest studies.

The summary noted that “AI chatbots are increasingly recognized for their ability to engage students in a personalized manner,” and shared the researchers making this claim and their evidence for it. Then it summarized some of the concerns researchers have.

Scite noted that “Despite the promising advantages, there is also critical discourse surrounding the implementation of AI chatbots in education," and that some researchers "caution about the hype surrounding AI chatbots, suggesting that while they exhibit considerable potential, their actual effectiveness in replacing traditional pedagogical methods requires comprehensive evaluation.”

Scite also shows you how often a paper has been cited, and lets you quickly view this citation, so you can tell if it was cited in a positive or negative way.

What Does Scite Do Well?

The Scite features described in the previous section are a really welcome resource for someone conducting a deep dive into any academic topic. This quick snapshot of the overall consensus around a topic is a wonderful place to start research. I would definitely recommend it for this purpose to students and fellow instructors.

The ability to quickly assess how often the paper has been cited, and in what context, gives you an almost instant sense of how the paper is viewed by other experts in the same field, which is so important given how one paper can sometimes find results that are seemingly amazing but can be so out of whack with other findings on the topic that it strains credibility.

Of course, there are some caveats. Scite does not have access to every academic paper, so students, in particular, need to be reminded not to begin and end their research with Scite.

Scite is not the only helpful AI research tool available, but it provides a quicker and more concise overview of research than others I’ve used, including STORM and OpenAI’s deep research tools. Both STORM and OpenAI’s research tend to provide longer and more in-depth overviews about any topic and write something based upon that topic for you. This might be preferable in some settings, but for me, the shorter overviews Scite provides are more useful and do what I want: help me find relevant research while leaving the actual writing to me or my students.

What Are Scite’s Limitations

Scite is a great tool, but it should not be your only research tool.

On some topics I investigated, I found several important studies that Scite missed or deemphasized. The tool also has a tendency to move toward centrist views on every issue. This is probably for the best overall, but doing that potentially risks overlooking some important minority viewpoints. And all summaries, even human-written ones, by their nature can gloss over nuance, particularly in discussions of complex topics, which most academic inquiries tend to examine.

So if I were to get approval from my university’s security and IT team to recommend this tool, I’d definitely remind students of these concerns. I'd also stress that while Scite can be helpful to use, it doesn’t replace conducting additional research on their own.

How Much Does Scite Cost?

Scite costs $20 for the basic individual subscription and $50 for pro. The pro subscription tier allows more paper collections and AI assistance in academic research.

Scite also offers custom pricing available for universities and schools.

Bottom Line: Is Scite a Good Tool For Teaching?

Overall, Scite is a helpful and engaging research tool that can likely benefit educators, academics, and students. It requires a monthly submission but seems worth it to those who regularly conduct research.

Ultimately, I found Scite to be one of the best AI research assistant tools around.

• Recognizing When Not To Use AI
• 10 Free AI Trainings and Certifications for Educators

ResearchRabbit is an AI tool that has been designed with research and literature study in mind. This is built to make finding and reading studies and papers far easier and more targeted.

While you can easily hop onto a search engine to begin hunting down what you want to read, this tool uses AI to make that search more relevant. It is able to learn from your searches and reading to better make recommendations and refine searches to suit what you might want to read.

This is primarily aimed at academics working in a certain field or students studying something very specialized. But it can be used by anyone who takes an interest in a specific subject, including teachers looking for research the latest developments in a field.

This guide aims to explain all you need to know about ResearchRabbit and how it could help you.

What is ResearchRabbit?

ResearchRabbit is described as the Spotify of papers. That means this is adaptive and will learn from how you search to better make recommendations and offer bespoke search result in future.

This is more than just a search engine in that it uses AI to learn from the papers you pick as relevant before serving up more in that area that may be of interest.

One reason this is a powerful new way to research is that it can be very up to date in making recommendations. So you may discover literature that you didn't even know existed, or find something for which you were even looking. The end result should be an expanded knowledge in your field that comes naturally and easily.

How does ResearchRabbit work?

ResearchRabbit initially has you add some papers to your project, finding a few that are relevant to that particular effort.

You are then presented with a network of papers that link to your starting point. These are presented using a helpful graphic visualization that makes everything very clear. Papers are linked via lines, and you can see which area might be more relevant before diving deeper into that pool of options, essentially.

Add any relevant papers to your project based on with what you are presented. This should then offer more results that are relevant to your new selection in your project folder.

If you save your project, once you're finished compiling papers, you can be contacted in future by ResearchRabbit with any new papers it may find that are relevant to your interests, keeping you up to date as research is released.

What are the best ResearchRabbit features?

ResearchRabbit offers its unique Network View, which shows papers in a connected mass, with publication dates along the side. This allows you to drag and move relevant research so you can see which papers move with it. For example, you might want one side of an argument on one side of the page with papers for the opposition on the other side. This will then pull other related papers in the relevant direction, leaving you with the balanced options in the middle. And that's just one of many ways to use this.

This also works with authors, allowing you to view that network or dive deeper into their other works -- or to step across into linked work from other authors involved in that paper.

Usefully, you can share your project collections. This can make for a great way for teachers to share a selection of materials with a class, or for co-workers to share with one another easily.

The fact you get sent updates when relevant papers are released is a powerful part of this tool's appeal. It's like having a research assistant that leaves new literature in your inbox ready for you as and when it becomes available, all to review at your leisure.

It offers a community element through which you can comment on papers and collaborate on projects to research together. This adds another layer to how discovery can happen to better help your chances of finding relevant literature that you might otherwise have missed.

How much does ResearchRabbit cost?

ResearchRabbit is a free to use AI service. Its makers are clear to say that this costs nothing now and will remain that way as it plans to offer this to researchers for free in the future also.

ResearchRabbit best tips and tricks

Collaborate
Work as a class on a project to find the most relevant papers.

Teach in bulk
Collate papers in one place and share that with students for them to read, along with updates for them to use as needed.

Use alerts to teach
Take new updates as a place to dive into fresh research and topics in a timely and up-to-date way.

• New Teacher Starter Kit
• Best Tools for Teachers

Researchers at the University of San Diego have conducted what they say is the most rigorous Turing test of AI models to date and found it was nearly impossible for participants to distinguish humans from AI models in short conversations.

Introduced in a 1950 paper by computing pioneer Alan Turing, the “Turing test” or what he called the “imitation game,” is a classic test of machine intelligence in which a judge interacts with a human and an AI or machine, and tries to assess which one is human.

“Turing opens the paper with the question, 'Can machines think?' And then he says this is an unanswerable question, let's focus on an easier question, a practical question,” says Cameron Jones, a postdoc in the Language and Cognition Lab at UC San Diego. Jones adds, Turing goes on to suggest, “that if a machine can imitate a human on any topic, if it can produce behavior that's indistinguishable from a human, we shouldn't have any grounds for saying that the human is intelligent, but the machine isn't.”

Although Jones notes there is some debate over how serious Turing was, the test has become a commonly cited benchmark of machine intelligence.

GPT-4.5 and The Turing Test

For their study, Jones and colleagues ran two separate experiments. First, they recruited 126 undergraduate participants through the psychology program at UC San Diego. They also recruited 158 paid participants from a study-participant platform called Prolific.

In these experiments, Jones and his collaborators tested multiple AI models. The research found that “when prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant.”

Given the same prompt, LLaMa-3.1 was judged to be human 56% of the time, about the same as the humans they were compared to. Meanwhile, GPT-4o was thought to be human just 21% of the time.

The results of these two experiments have been published as a preprint study, so have not yet been peer reviewed. Nonetheless, Jones believes what his research has found has several implications for educators around the way we teach, test, and prepare students for the workforce.

Turing Test Results and Education

“The idea behind the Turing test is this kind of idea of indistinguishability. And so if models can produce behavior that's indistinguishable from human behavior, then we say that the models are as intelligent as people,” Jones says. “If people can't tell the difference between a human and a machine, then it's not clear that the human will have any marginal value at that task. So I think that's got to be a big worry in education: trying to think about what are the types of activities that will have a comparative advantage for humans in the future.”

He adds, “One thing that our results do suggest is that models have maybe already reached this stage for short conversations with strangers, and there might be quite a lot of jobs that have that component to them.”

What exactly these AI-proof jobs are is still a "million-dollar question." Broadly speaking, however, Jones says AI models still struggle with things such as hallucinations. Most also have a tendency to fail at their "jobs," for unexplained reasons, and that even a 5% fail rate can be a big problem in certain roles.

Most significantly AI models tend to fail at "long-horizon planning and use of context," he says. "An employee who has been at the company for three years has just picked up a lot of implicit knowledge about where things are and why things are done the way they're done."

He adds, "Manufacturing and maintaining a context window to include all of this information for an LLM can be very challenging. This means that tasks which take a person longer than a few hours are often too complex for models, because they either lack sufficient context or their errors compound, or their context window gets too bloated."

So until AI programs gain long-term memory and/or institutional knowledge, and can integrate all that consistently into tasks, humans still will be needed.

Evaluations Going Forward

The inability to distinguish between human and machine creations on school assignments is already an issue many teachers are familiar with and battling. Jones’ research highlights that this cheating risk is real. In addition, it raises questions about how we evaluate students.

In that vein, Jones says educators will need to start asking themselves questions such as, “What's the evaluation for? What is it that you're trying to learn if you're evaluating people on things that you can't distinguish between humans and models?”

These are questions that educators have been grappling with and debating since ChatGPT was released, but this type of research highlights the need for addressing them as AI continues to improve.

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Cross-age tutoring is a method of tutoring in which older students help younger students learn. A recent meta-analysis of various types of cross-age tutoring interventions saw a positive impact for both those who received tutoring and the tutors themselves. In fact, the tutors actually saw slightly more improvement in their reading skills.

The study, Examining the Academic Effects of Cross-age Tutoring: A Meta-analysis, was published in Educational Psychology Review in March. This study puts forth further evidence that cross-age tutoring is a cost-effective method to provide meaningful improvements for students, say two of its coauthors, Elizabeth Swanson and Andrew Chang.

Cross-Age Tutoring Research

Cross-age tutoring has long been supported by research, but it had been nearly a decade since a meta-analysis had been conducted on the intervention's overall impact. And previous research did not always look at the impact of the intervention on the tutors themselves.

For this study, researchers looked at 32 studies with more than 4,500 participants combined. This allowed them to examine the impact of cross-age tutoring in a wide range of contexts.

“We looked at factors like tutor type, like older student versus adult volunteers or number of tutoring sessions, or a tutor who has learning difficulties versus a typically developing tutor, and subject area, like reading versus math. Surprisingly, none of these factors significantly changes the result,” says Chang, a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University. “Cross-age tutoring was helpful across different situations, whether there were many or few sessions, or whether tutors were older students or adult volunteers, whether tutors were struggling learners or typically developing learners, or whether the subject was reading or math.”

Swanson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin with a primary appointment with The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, notes there are several big implications of these findings. “Kids are doing just as well tutoring as adults,” she says. “That's kind of a big deal.”

She adds the benefit seen for the tutors is also significant. “Think about the third through fifth grader who may be struggling a little bit with reading, but they can deliver a first-grade reading intervention. I mean, the fact that they also benefit, to put it colloquially, is a great bang for your buck.”

Further Cross-Age Tutoring Research

In addition to this meta-analysis, researchers headed by Swanson are working on a large randomized control study of cross-age tutoring interventions conducted after school at more than 60 YMCAs and involving hundreds of students.

For this study, students are split into three groups: A group receiving tutoring from adults; a group receiving cross-age tutoring; and a third group receiving no intervention.

So far, this study’s findings are similar to what is expected from the meta-analysis, with a similarly positive impact seen from adult- and student-led tutors.

“Our early analysis indicates that these two treatment groups are performing equally well,” Swanson says.

Both students and adults use the same instructional materials, and Swanson’s team records sessions.

“We listen to these recordings, and we score them; we say, ‘How close are you to the intervention as it was designed?’” Swanson says. “These kids are reaching equal levels to adults in delivery and alignment to the intervention, so they can deliver the intervention just as well as an adult, sometimes better.”

Cross-Age Tutoring Takeaways For Educators

Educators shouldn’t view cross-age tutoring as a silver bullet, but it is a cost-effective intervention, say Swanson and Chang.

“It should not be the only intervention that young children receive in reading, but it could be added with not much time and no extra cost,” Swanson says.

She adds it’s an intervention that does not need to be limited to schools. “Think about after-school care providers and their role in reading and math intervention and improving academic outcomes,” she says. Her work with YMCA after-school programs suggests these types of programs can help support academics.

Chang adds that there’s a lot to be enthusiastic about in the findings of the new meta-analysis.

“This is good news for schools," he says. "It shows that cross-age tutoring can work in various settings with different kinds of students and subjects, and it gives teachers and school leaders the flexibility to adopt a program to their own context without worrying too much about specific conditions.”

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In the digital age, the practice of academic research is undergoing significant transformation. Among the most powerful tools emerging for researchers, including students and educators in the K-12 setting, is the use of advanced search technologies that go beyond the keyword matching of traditional search engines (Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc.) to retrieve more relevant, comprehensive, and nuanced results.

With ChatGPT, the advanced search tool is called Deep Research, while Gemini’s version is Deep Search. Perplexity’s option is simply called Research and it will email a report to your inbox. While these tools can provide substantial advantages in educational settings, particularly in relationship to time, critical concerns need to be thoughtfully addressed.

Deep search tools engage in the use of advanced algorithms to retrieve information from vast databases, including academic journals, books, web archives, and multimedia sources beyond the scope of traditional web-based searches. Unlike traditional search engines that rely primarily on keyword matching, deep search tools can synthesize complex information, identify connections across disciplines, and even summarize or cluster related findings.

Beyond the tools available within the more common AI Chat tools, there are a number that are entirely devoted to deeper research.

• Semantic academic search tools such as Elicit, Research Rabbit, and Consensus.
• AI-enhanced databases such as Gale in Context: High School or ProQuest Education Database
• Browser-integrated extensions that refine search results in real-time, such as Perplexity AI’s Pro Search or Google Scholar’s advanced filters

Advantages of Deep Search in K-12 Context

1. Potential for Improved Research Relevance

K-12 students often struggle with constructing precise search queries, especially when working on complex or unfamiliar topics. Deep search tools reduce this burden by interpreting natural language and inferring contextual meaning, thus yielding more accurate results.

For example: A 10th-grade student researching "climate change and agriculture" might receive irrelevant results using a standard search engine. A deep search tool should prioritize scholarly articles, datasets, and reports that directly address how changing weather patterns impact food production, rather than articles that only tangentially mention both topics.

2. Guided Access to Credible Sources

Deep search systems often prioritize or exclusively retrieve information from academic sources, helping students differentiate between credible research and unreliable websites. For K-12 learners, especially in middle and high school, this function is crucial in teaching information literacy and source evaluation.

Many school librarians have begun integrating platforms such as EBSCO’s Explora for Schools or JSTOR’s free student portal into the curriculum, allowing students to experience academic-level research safely and with guidance. However, the student and instructor both need to ensure that the sources obtained are credible.

For example, using the free deep search tools, Wikipedia showed up as a primary source in a couple of the sample searches I tried for this article.

3. Time Efficiency and Cognitive Support

By surfacing high-quality sources quickly and often summarizing key arguments, deep search tools support students in managing large research tasks within limited timeframes. These tools also support diverse learners, including those with reading challenges or executive function disorders.

For example, a U.S. history teacher might use an AI-powered tool to help students narrow down research topics on the Civil Rights Movement, providing summaries of landmark cases, primary sources, and thematic groupings that scaffold independent inquiry.

4. Democratization of Research Skills

Access to these advanced research tools can level the playing field for students across socioeconomic and geographic contexts. Schools without vast physical libraries or local access to an academic library can leverage deep search platforms to provide rich academic resources that are otherwise out of reach.

Cautions Regarding Deep Search In the K-12 Context

While deep search tools offer powerful benefits, the use of these raise pedagogical, ethical, and developmental concerns, especially with younger students. This is especially true when the use of generative AI in any form is frowned upon or outright banned.

1. Over-Reliance and Reduced Critical Thinking

Deep search tools may do too much of the cognitive heavy lifting, summarizing, analyzing, and ranking content. Students may passively consume synthesized results rather than learning how to critically analyze original texts or even search for digital and print materials beyond what the search tool will retrieve.

For example, a high school English teacher may worry that students are bypassing close reading of literary criticism by simply quoting AI-generated summaries or relying on AI clustering to formulate arguments. Instructors need to ensure students learn the basics of document analysis prior to introducing deep research tools.

In that vein, recently, one instructor commented to me about how her student seemed like a squirrel running around to collect a lot of nuts (in this case, sources) but was not able to put any of it into a coherent order for the reader. Instructors need to ensure that the time saved with rapid retrieval is used to improve the writing process and critical thinking.

2. Opaque Algorithms and Bias in Results

Many deep search engines operate as black boxes, meaning the way information is prioritized, excluded, or ranked is not transparent. This can lead to algorithmic bias, potentially excluding diverse voices, minority perspectives, or emerging scholarship not yet indexed by major databases.

For example, a 12th-grade student researching "racial bias in standardized testing" may encounter filtered results that favor official reports over grassroots critiques or skip lesser-known authors whose work is highly relevant. Teachers should guide students in using multiple tools to gather sources, triangulate data, and question what is missing from the results they receive.

A key concern in my sample searches was the large number of sources gleaned from non-academic websites and not from more reviewed and professionally curated sources.

3. Age-Inappropriate Content and Misinformation

Although many platforms have educational safeguards, not all deep search tools are designed for children or teens. Students may encounter inaccurate, inappropriate, or ideologically slanted material, especially when using general AI-based search tools without filters.

All of this is not a change from traditional searches, but it bears repeating. Particularly, if the student expects that deep search tools will provide more factual and academically appropriate information.

For instance, a 9th-grader researching gender in sports might come across controversial political content and opinions presented as factual information. Schools should recommend vetted educational tools and teach digital literacy skills, including how to evaluate bias, intent, and evidence in sources. Such instruction should start early.

4. Academic Integrity

As deep search tools become more sophisticated, they can mimic human synthesis of information, potentially blurring the lines between research and AI-assisted plagiarism. Students may submit AI-generated summaries without reading or comprehending the source material.

Schools need academic integrity policies that include ethical generative AI, use guidelines for research tools, and establish consistent expectations for citation and originality.

5. Equity and Access Gaps

Despite the democratizing potential of deep search tools, access is still uneven. Schools in under-resourced districts may lack high-speed internet, subscriptions to advanced databases, or staff trained to teach research skills effectively. Consequently, districts should ensure equitable access to digital libraries, provide professional development for teachers, and collaborate with public libraries to extend research resources for all students.

Deep search is transforming the landscape of academic research for K-12 students, offering unprecedented access to relevant, credible, and comprehensive information. When used thoughtfully, these tools support inquiry-based learning, promote academic rigor, and foster research confidence among young learners.

Yet, as with any powerful tool, deep search must be accompanied by intentional instruction, ethical considerations, and equitable access to ensure that it enhances rather than undermines the goals of education.

By equipping students with the skills to critique, navigate, and responsibly use deep search technologies, K-12 educators can cultivate a generation of learners who are wise information consumers and thoughtful, discerning, and empowered researchers.

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When it comes to whether students learn better by typing or through handwriting, educators and parents want easy answers, Svetlana Pinet tells me.

“People want to know, ‘What should I do?'” says Pinet, a staff scientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, Spain.

The problem is that the topic is complex and full of nuance, and students often benefit from learning both typing and writing. “Both exist and we have to do both,” she says. “One is going to yield you something; one is going to yield you something else. It’s not like you really have to choose.”

Handwriting’s Connection To Learning Is Not Settled Science

A 2024 study compared brainwaves in adults who typed vs. those who wrote by hand and concluded that the handwriters had more brain activity. This study was viewed more than 84,000 times and was amplified by coverage in more than 170 news outlets, including a story I wrote for this publication.

Many of these stories overemphasized the implications of the study, essentially suggesting that it was settled science that students learned more when writing by hand than typing.

That’s not necessarily the case, Pinet says, which is why she and a colleague, Marieke Longcamp, wrote a commentary on this handwriting study. Pinet and Longcamp argue that since the study looked at brain scans of adults and did not measure what they learned, it is hard to conclude much from the results.

The abstract, or summary, really makes it sound like it has huge consequences for children learning to write, but it's really not so direct,” Pinet says, adding that the study never tested participants on what they actually learned.

Brain measures, on the other hand, are less direct and can be subject to interpretation. For instance, in this study, in an attempt to control for some of the inherent differences between brain activity in typers and handwriters, study participants were asked to type with one finger; however, Pinet says doing this limited the implications of the research.

“Most people don't type that way,” she says.

Typing Vs. Handwriting In General

Pinet, however, stresses that she is not against teaching handwriting and notes that while more needs to be understood about its impact on learning overall, we do know that writing by hand can help students learn to write and recognize letters.

“This is because the motor action that you're doing when you're doing handwriting is much more precise, and that helps you remember this new letter,” Pinet says. “In typing, the motor action is you’re just pressing a button and it’s the same action no matter the letter. You can say that you're using a different finger, but the action itself isn’t different. If you're writing by hand, writing an ‘A’ is very different from writing a 'B,' and that helps you dissociate them.”

For these reasons, Pinet believes handwriting should remain a part of education. “In some countries, handwriting is being taught less and less, and so it is important to defend handwriting,” she says. “It really freaks me out to think that children will not learn to handwrite, and not only because of the dependence on technology but because we know that it is an important skill and that it does transform your brain in a specific way.”

However, she also believes typing is an important skill for students to be instructed in, and notes that many countries do not have formal typing instruction as part of the school curriculum.

Ultimately, her advice to educators is to try and find the right balance between the two forms of writing. “I think as much as possible, you should encourage both,” she says.

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A new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that when young people reframe their relationship with social media, they reduce its negative impact on their mental health.

The study, conducted by researchers in Canada, looked at 393 social media-using young adults between the ages of 17 and 29 who had elevated mental health concerns and said that social media negatively impacted their lives. These participants were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group that continued to use social media in the same way; a group that was encouraged to abstain from using social media entirely; and a group in which participants took a tutorial and were encouraged to use social media in a way that enhanced connectedness.

During the six-week period in which participants were tracked, the control group did not improve, as expected, however, members of the abstinence and education groups both saw mental health improvements, albeit in different ways.

“The abstinence group was the only group to cut back on depression, stress, and anxiety over the six-week period,” says Amori Yee Mikami, the study’s lead author. “But the education group, the ones we taught the tips and tricks to, they were actually the only ones to cut back on fear of missing out and loneliness.”

Mikami, who is psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, says the study and future research in this area has implications for how school leaders and other policy-makers respond to social media’s mental health implications.

“There's a lot of like talk about how social media can be really bad for your mental health, and I think it can be,” she says. “But to me, the biggest takeaway is that there might be another option in addition to, or instead of, just trying to quit, there could be a way to instead learn some tips and tricks to use social media in a smarter way.”

Social Media and Mental Health: Using It Differently

The participants in the education arm of the study were encouraged to be mindful in their social media use.

“A lot of people say that they use social media kind of mindlessly,” Mikami says. “It's like a reflex: You pick up your phone to check, but you don't even know why you're checking. It just feels like a habit. What we're trying to do in that education group is to change that pattern. So to use social media more intentionally with purpose, and while paying attention to what you're getting out of it, and how it's making you feel.”

She adds, “The point is to log out from, or try to detach from, move away from, reduce the type of use that's making you feel bad, but conversely, lean into and amp up the type of use that is making you feel good and bringing you the things that you want in your life.”

Generally speaking, people want to avoid things such as doom scrolling and comparing themselves to an influencer they don’t know or truly care about. Instead, people should spend more time focusing on the type of social media use they tend to enjoy, which is usually focused on those they know and care about in real life, Mikami says.

“Lean into those relationships,” she says. “That might mean trying intentionally to be more actively engaged with them, commenting on their posts, sending them a direct message.”

Implications For School and Classroom Policy and Future Research

Mikami says the next stage of this study is to look at the impact of similar interventions in younger teens in the middle or high school age range in the U.S. or secondary school in Canada.

“Some of the participants in our study said that the tips and tricks were really helpful now, but they would have been more helpful when they were in secondary school,” Mikami says. “A lot of them said, 'Well, it just felt like social media was our whole world back then.'”

In the meantime, educators and parents can help children by changing their own social media habits and discussing that.

“Adults of all ages are probably just as guilty of mindless social media use as teens are,” Mikami says. “I encourage parents and teachers to think about your own social media use and the model that you're setting for your kids, and then talk about it with your kids.”

Many schools have banned cell phones in the U.S., in part in an attempt to limit social media use, and Australia has even banned it for children 16 and under. This research suggests that might not be the only option.

“I wonder if it's unrealistic for everybody to stop social media use entirely; even if you try to forbid 16-year-olds to use social media, they're going to find some way around it,” Mikami says. “Then you've made it forbidden, and once they're 17, I wonder if you'll see a rebound effect.”

She adds, "Cutting down social media use on average is probably a good idea. What I like about this study is that there are other options, too. It's not just about the total amount of time you use social media. It's also about what you're doing on social media.”

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In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza famously started leaving meetings or conversations with friends early after he told a funny story in order to end on a high note.

I was recently reminded of this episode by David Miele, program director of Applied Developmental & Educational Psychology at Boston College, because there’s a lesson here linked to student motivation.

Researchers have long known that as school tasks become more difficult student motivation can decrease as they encounter more failure. Building in opportunities for success — for instance, by giving them easier math questions — can counteract this, but runs the risk of watering down the content being taught, Miele says.

Separate research indicates that people remember the beginning and ends of tasks best through what psychologists call "primacy" and "recency" effects. They also seem to better remember specific parts.

“People tend to overweight the pleasure or pain they experienced at the end of the task, but also at the most intense point of the task,” says Miele.

This is where the idea of George Costanza leaving on a high note comes in--research done with adults has found what is termed the “remembered success effect” in which academic tasks that start or end with extra opportunities for success were found to be preferred to the challenging tasks alone.

Miele and his colleagues, including Bridgid Finn (who Miele stresses was really instrumental in this research), wondered if they could boost student motivation without decreasing academic rigor by providing mostly rigorous questions in a text or activity but also including some easier questions at the beginning or end of the exam.

Ultimately, what they found suggests there are some simple ways teachers can motivate student activity.

The Remembered Success Effect

To study the remembered success effect in children, Miele and his colleagues worked with 570 third- and sixth-graders for a paper published in 2024. All students were given an assessment with 10 difficult math problems. Some students were also given five additional questions that were easier.

The study found that in both grades, students who got the additional questions at the beginning or end of the session valued the activity to a greater extent. Although the task with the additional easier questions took longer to complete, it didn't feel that way for students.

“There was also a tendency to perceive the longer task as having been the shorter task,” Miele says. This study potentially has big implications for how teachers motivate students through difficult tasks.

Takeaways From This Research For Teachers

Miele notes this research suggests there are steps that teachers can do to maintain students positive evaluations toward a really challenging task without watering it down. These steps have the added benefit of being low-cost and not requiring a tremendous amount of time for teachers to undertake, he says.

“It could be as simple as just taking some problems that they know to be relatively easier and positioning them in the beginning or end of the task,” he says.

Some caveats are needed, however. To get the desired effect, these questions need to go at the beginning or end of the assignment. Also, some studies suggest adding questions can still fatigue students even if they don’t perceive it.

“There might be potential fatigue effects associated with doing more math problems, even though subjectively, they're like, ‘I enjoy that task more.’ It doesn't mean that they're not a little bit more tired out by having solved more math problems,” Miele says.

Knowing this can influence how a teacher plans follow-up activities. Also, if you’re planning multiple activities, constantly tacking on additional questions could start to be counterproductive due to fatigue, Miele says.

Of course, more research on all this is still needed to better piece out how and when the remembered success effect can best be utilized. Miele is working on further studies to fine-tune how teachers can best use the remembered success effect.

But for now, we're going to follow George Costanza’s lesson and end here on a high note: “Alright, that's it for me. Goodnight everybody!”

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Google Learn About is a new experimental AI-driven platform available that provides digestible and in-depth knowledge about various topics, but showcases it all in an educational context. Described by Google as a “conversational learning companion,” it is essentially a Wikipedia-style chatbot/search engine, and then some.

In addition to having a variety of already-created topics and leading questions (in areas such as history, arts, culture, biology, and physics) the tool allows you to enter prompts using either text or an image. It then provides a general overview/answer, and then suggests additional questions, topics, and more to explore in regard to the initial subject.

The idea is for student use is that the AI can help guide a deeper learning process rather than just provide static answers.

So let’s see what I learned about Google Learn About.

Learn About: Trying Text Search

I tested Learn About by simply typing “Benedict Arnold” into the search bar under “What would you like to learn today?”

In addition to a biographical thumbnail with multiple images (all credited with sources), Learn About provided related topics for Benedict Arnold and the American Revolution (in the left side bar), including various events in his life, reasons behind his betrayal of the American cause, and other impacts.

In the main section below the biography, the next section that comes up is “Why It Matters,” which provides a brief overview of how Arnold’s treasonous turn has impacted U.S. history. It also offers a “Test Your Knowledge” multiple choice question regarding which fort Arnold tried to hand over to the British. Clicking on an answer provides extra details about Arnold’s exploits.

Scrolling down provided a gallery of more sources, including a link to the Wikipedia page, multiple videos, and content from other vetted sources such as History.com, the National Park Service, and Biography.com. It also offers options to simplify, go deeper, or get images.

Also provided are follow-up questions about Arnold, such as “What led him to betray the Americans?” and “What happened to Arnold after he switched sides?” Selecting one of the choices here brings up an interactive list of topics for more exploration and various sources.

Going deeper, more interactive features are provided, such as “Common Misconceptions,” “Build Your Vocabulary,” and “Stop and Think.”

It’s easy to see how Learn About could be a dynamic research partner for a student. It parses out information to discourage any sort of “copy-and-paste” book report-like results, and also encourages a bit of deeper thinking and focus to navigate the topic at hand. The inclusion of interactive features also is more engaging than a static web page or even AI-generated report.

By the way, selecting any of the prompts on the Learn About homepage offers a similar choose-your-own-path learning experience, with all the same kinds of features, interactives, and sourced content.

Trying the Learn About Image Search

Curious about this approach, I tried the Learn About image search by uploading the image of an engraving of Benedict Arnold by H.B. Hall, taken from Wikimedia Commons, which is one of the most cited images of Arnold. I was given the option of drawing on the image or using the text prompt box, which I opted for and typed, “Who is this?”

Unfortunately, the image was incorrectly identified as George Washington, and all the various features and options that I previously described for Arnold were provided but focused on Washington.

I then retried the image upload and asked, “Is this Benedict Arnold?” This time, it correctly identified Arnold, and then followed the content/interactive cycle previously described.

I tried a third Arnold image upload, and this time used the pen tool to write “Who is this?” on the image. Learn About replied, “You've circled a portrait of a person! Would you like to learn more about famous figures in history, or perhaps a different topic?” So not a right or wrong answer, just an indication that Learn About needs a bit more tweaking and testing for its image-reading feature.

Wondering if it was maybe the image selected, I tried a different portrait of Benedict Arnold, this one a well-known formal portrait painted by Thomas Hart in 1776, and also obtained through Wikimedia Commons. Again, I asked, "Who is this?"

Unfortunately, once again Learn About misidentified the subject, saying, "This is a portrait of Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat and military officer who was a key figure in the American Revolutionary War." Followed by all the content features and interactives focused on Lafayette.

Again, this is another indication that more testing and experimenting needs to be done for this particular search aspect of Learn About.

Ultimately, Google Learn About is a choose-your-own-adventure type of learning experience, with a seemingly endless amount of choices and paths through what appears to be quality, curated content, all powered by Google. It still has a little ways to go in its testing phase, but it seems to be on track to be a more helpful learning resource for students than a cold Google search or a static Wikipedia page.

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It’s not just your students -- people across the globe really don’t like to think.

At least that’s what the findings of a new study suggest. Published in Psychological Bulletin, the study examined data from 170 previous studies looking at motivation, which together had thousands of participants from different cultures.

“Overall, mental effort felt aversive in different types of tasks (e.g., tasks with and without feedback), in different types of populations (e.g., university-educated populations and non-university-educated populations), and on different continents,” the study authors write. “Supporting theories that conceptualize effort as a cost, we suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.”

You probably don’t want to think any more about this, but if you’re willing to undergo the effort, two of the study's co-authors discuss how the research was conducted and what its implications are for educators.

Thinking and Motivation

The inspiration for the research was a decades-old debate in psychology about mental effort, says study co-author Erik Bijleveld, who is a psychologist and professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

“On the one hand, we know that people avoid mental effort when they can,” Bijleveld says. “On the other hand, psychologists also assume that people can easily learn associations between mental effort and rewards. For example, in schools and universities, students are often complimented after they have exerted mental effort. So, in life, there are plenty of opportunities to learn that mental effort is linked to reward. If this is true, people may well be able to learn to enjoy mental effort.”

Thinking Is Even More Unpleasant Than We Think

Bijleveld and his co-authors were surprised by just how thinking-adverse people are and how little rewards seemed to do to change that. “Even in tasks that have game-like features, such as performance feedback, it turns out that mental effort still feels very unpleasant,” Bijleveld says. “Even people who likely had been rewarded for their mental effort many times in their past, like people with a university education, still experience mental effort as unpleasant.”

He adds that he and his colleagues found that mental effort feels unpleasant in a wide range of settings and contexts. "We really looked hard for possible exceptions—maybe effort feels nice just in some tasks, or just for some people—but we found no compelling evidence for this,” he says.

What Does This All Mean For Educators

Louise David, a co-author of the study, says the research has many implications for educators.

“Since learning is usually associated with mental effort, students, like other individuals, might be inclined to minimize mental effort due to the unpleasantness associated with it,” David says.

With this in mind, educators should focus on creating structured and supportive learning environments that, for example, balance challenging tasks with guided practice, scaffolding, and clear instructions, she says. Incorporating gamification elements and working to connect students more deeply with the material might also help. “Tasks that provide meaning, responsibility, and feedback could reduce the aversive nature of mental effort,” David says.

Another important step might be to recognize student effort rather than merely the results. “Learning is not always fun and does not always feel good,” David says. “By recognizing and rewarding students’ effort, not just learning outcomes, educators may encourage a more positive association with effortful cognitive activities.”

Of Course, Mental Effort Isn't All Bad

Educators and their students may also want to remember that the aversion they feel to some difficult tasks is not unique to them and not always a bad thing. Just like feeling tired while exercising can be a good sign for someone getting in shape.

“In the case of mental effort, the unpleasantness may serve a purpose. For example, there is this effect called ‘the IKEA effect,’ named after the furniture store,” Bijleveld says. “The idea is that if people invest more effort into making or creating something, this increases the extent to which they value the product of their work. So, if people invested effort into something, this does tell them that that something is very meaningful or valuable to them. After all, why would they have endured the unpleasantness of effort?”

He adds that in this sense, “The unpleasantness of mental effort may serve as a compass to people, giving them direction regarding what they care about, and by extension, who they are as a person.”

• A New Book Argues Grades Are Failing Students. Here’s Why
• 5 Ways Science Informs My Teaching

Gamification has become a popular educational approach, having demonstrated solid potential as a learning tool. However, it's not always clear exactly which gamified elements are helping, and in some instances, it can foster counterproductive competition and enhance extrinsic motivation rather than the more effective intrinsic motivation.

Education experts Sebastian Deterding and Naomi Clark have studied the benefits and limitations of gamification in education, and acknowledge that the approach has pros and cons.

Here’s a closer look at the research around gamification.

Gamification Gold Stars

Overall, gamification should earn an achievement badge. A 2020 review of empirical studies looking at gamification found the intervention had small but significant positive effects on cognitive, motivational, and behavioral outcomes.

“There seemed to be particular evidence for interventions that combine collaborative and competitive elements,” says Deterding, Chair of Design Engineering at Imperial College London.

Rather than have students compete individually against one another or work all together, the best results from gamification seemed to occur when groups of students were broken into teams and competed against one another, creating a “collaborative and competitive environment,” Deterding says.

Naomi Clark, chair of NYU's Game Center in the Tisch School of the Arts, says gamification works by providing learners with extra motivation and feedback that helps students measure progress.

That extra motivation can be particularly helpful when a student is learning a new skill and is not yet seeing the fruits of their efforts. “What it does is break things into small steps and says, ‘We’re going to give you a little bit of positive reinforcements for finishing a task,'” Clark says.

At the same time, by tracking scores in the manner of a game, Clark says, gamification processes help students reflect on what they’ve accomplished and see how they have grown.

When Gamification Goes Out of Bounds  

Right now our knowledge of why gamification works is limited.

“Once we move to the level of these individual design elements, we actually know very little because the research is very poor,” Deterding says. “Most gamification interventions just throw a ton of features together into the same intervention, and then look at the overall outcome. So we can't really tell anything about the individual elements.”

But these small design elements can have big impact. A study Deterding conducted with colleagues found that how college students interpreted badges while using Khan Academy and Code Academy influenced their learning.

“If you understood them as a goal-setting element — so the system tells you what you should try and work on next — that was generally helpful,” he says.

However, if you understood the badges as a reward, you were often tempted to continue getting awards by spending more time on the skills you already mastered. “So it was actually very detrimental to learning,” Deterding says.

This highlights one of the problems with gamification.

“Gamification has been shown to rely on what psychologists call 'extrinsic motivation'— you're getting a reward that is not necessarily an inherent or built-in part of what you're doing,” Clark says.

The intrinsic motivation for learning to cook, for instance, would be getting better at cooking because of the joy the skill brings, Clark says. On the other hand, the extrinsic motivation might be a random reward for peeling potatoes. “The problem with extrinsic motivation is that it can actually cause intrinsic motivation to deteriorate,” Clark says.

Navigating Toward Positive Outcomes With Gamification  

Maximizing the benefits while minimizing any potential negatives of gamification is often about good common sense teaching practices. For instance, you can look for gameplay elements that enhance intrinsic motivation by reminding students about the inherent values of the skill they are learning. Teachers can do this by incorporating storytelling into the gamified elements of the lesson and emphasizing its real-world implications.

A related term to gamification, called ‘playificaiton,’ really focuses on this, Clark says. “So it's not just rote memorization; learn to read this word, but then you actually get to read a story and see, ‘Oh, this is really great, I get to experience the story now that I can read it on my own. It's not just I'm getting stars and badges, and trumpet sounds playing to reward me.'”

Deterding says educators can maximize gamification's benefits through trial and error. “The way that I approach my own classrooms, the way that I'm sure lots of educators approach their classrooms, is you try it out. You see what happens,” he says. “Maybe you even ask your students afterward, 'How was that? How did you like it? Did you dislike it? And why, etc.?' And then you iterate on that. So don't view gamification as a surefire one-and-done exercise, which I think holds for most educational interventions.”

Related:

• 5 Ways Science Informs My Teaching
• The Research-Practice Divide is Real. Here's How To Overcome It.

The fluid nature of the Internet allows for constant change, growth, and expansion. However, that means websites change and URLs break as content is shifted, moved, or taken down, which can cause problems for researchers, instructors, and students.

If you do come across a broken link, however, don’t panic! Several potential methods are available to retrieve the materials.

Direct Linking

When curating course content, it is best practice to link directly to the original website. Doing so ensures students access the most up-to-date version of the material, properly attributes the work to its creators, drives traffic to their sites, and supports their efforts. Direct links also help students develop digital literacy skills by exposing them to the broader context of the resource. In addition, linking avoids potential copyright infringement issues arising from unauthorized redistribution of downloaded content.

Although direct links are a great practice, it is also prudent to download backup copies of any necessary articles.

Go Wayback

One useful tool for retrieving internet content is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which stores snapshots of web pages over time going back more than 20 years. Simply enter the broken URL into the Wayback Machine to see if a cached version of the page is available. It is often the best way to recover materials lost to a broken link.

Check for Typos

Previous links also stop working as intended for many reasons. The broken link can be due to a typo in the URL itself, or a piece of the URL was dropped when copied or pasted. It is worth looking at the text of the URL itself. Sometimes https://www.techlearning.com/tag/resource-library is retyped to something such as https://www.techlearning.org/tag/resource-library or https://www.techlearning.com/resource-library. A quick look can identify the correct URL and resolve the issue succinctly.

A More Detailed Search

Another approach is to do a Google search using the specific keywords from the article title or content. Enclose the exact title in quotes to narrow down the results. For example, search for “Exact Title of the Article” to find other sites where the article may be located.

Sometimes checking citation databases such as ResearchGate or Scopus will provide a copy of the article. These platforms often provide detailed citations or full-text access to articles. Research Gate allows searchers to email an author for a full-text copy if one still needs to be uploaded to the site.

Go Around Walls

Those doing considerable research should consider installing a browser extension such as Unpaywall or Lazy Scholar. These extensions can help find free versions of inaccessible articles by scanning multiple repositories. The LazyScholar extension searches several databases in the background including Google Scholar, Dessimin, and PubMed Central.

Go Old School

A non-technology option would be to ask a librarian or media specialist to see if they can obtain the article via interlibrary loan, or perhaps there is a copy in a local library collection. It may not be the most convenient option, but depending on your needs, it can be a successful one.

Again, when creating class resources, instructors and researchers should link directly to original websites for up-to-date access, proper attribution, and to support content creators. If a link breaks, tools such as Wayback Machine, search engines, and citation databases are available to retrieve the material. Additionally, downloading backup copies and consulting librarians can help ensure continuous access to valuable resources.

Good luck!

Related:

• Publicly Available Digital Collections
• 3 Useful AI Research Tools for Educators

Digital leisure reading on a phone, tablet, or computer, has many applications. Anyone with a phone or other device can get instant answers to questions and access to newspapers, magazines, research papers, and ebooks.

All that can be a great way to increase student access to various texts, but when it comes to aiding students’ reading comprehension, digital leisure reading appears to fall short of traditional print reading. 

A recent study found that there was almost no connection between digital leisure reading and improvements in reading comprehension. This is in contrast to previous research that showed reading in print, whether for leisure or school, helped improve developing readers’ comprehension. 

“We already knew about the positive relationship between print reading and reading comprehension, but we did not have any study that had gathered the evidence about digital reading from the last decades,” says Lidia Altamura, lead author of the new study on digital reading and reading comprehension and a PhD student at the University of Valencia in Spain. 

How Was This Digital Reading Comprehension Study Conducted and What Did It Find?

This study was an analysis of 25 studies, published between 2000 and 2022, involving about 470,000 participants from at least three dozen countries. Given the minimal connection observed between digital leisure reading and reading comprehension, Altamura and her co-authors estimate that if a student spends 10 hours reading in print in their free time, their ability to comprehend will likely be six to eight times higher than if they read on digital devices for the same amount of time.

The extent of the difference between print and digital leisure reading impact observed, surprised the researchers. 

“We expected that, at least, digital leisure reading for informational purposes, such as visiting Wikipedia or other educational webpages, or reading the news, would be much more positively linked to comprehension,” Altamura says. “However, we did not find differences with other types of digital reading, which was closer to recreational reading such as chatting or checking social media.” 

Did The Age of Students Matter?  

Yes. For younger students in primary and middle school, if anything, digital leisure reading had a negative impact on reading comprehension. For older students in high school and college, the connection was positive but still smaller than it would be if they had read print

“The differences could be explained by sensitive periods of development. While younger children are still developing and consolidating their reading skills, older students rely on reading comprehension skills already acquired,” Altamura says. “This previous consolidation can help them overcome some of the challenges that digital reading presents.” 

Is Digital Reading As Good As Print Reading in general?  

Probably not. Researchers have long noted what is called the screen inferiority effect, which indicates that print readers tend to retain more information than digital readers. The same researchers behind this digital reading study also recently compared the effect of reading print vs. digital texts for students.

“We found a prevalent screen inferiority effect, meaning that the reading comprehension was slightly better in print than in digital format,” Altamura says. “The final data set consisted of 30 studies with 161,469 participants.” 

She adds, “This finding also helps us to understand why the relationship between leisure digital reading habits and reading comprehension is virtually nonexistent.”

What Are The Next Steps For This Type of Research?  

Given the amount of screen time most students experience, digital reading in young students is an area that needs further investigation.

“Most of the reviewed studies in our meta-analysis included secondary or university students,” Altamura says. “We think it is important to know how the relationship between digital reading frequency and reading comprehension evolves in time during early educational stages, such as primary school. This is something we are working on at the moment in a longitudinal study.” 

What Does This All Mean for Educators And Parents?  

“We encourage educators and parents to pay attention to the reading medium that children use for reading,” Altamura says. “We do not declare war on new technologies, they are undoubtedly part of today's education. However, we do have to take into account how we use them and how we can implement them, for example, depending on the subject and content. Another aspect to consider is the level of skills of the students.” 

She adds, “We suggest that it could be beneficial to introduce digital devices when a more consolidated reading comprehension base is already acquired, as is the case with secondary school students.” 

• The Screen Inferiority Effect: How Screens Affect Reading Comprehension
• Study: Students Who Read Print Learn More Than Those Who Read Tablets

When it comes to selecting edtech that protects student privacy, few districts are earning high marks. 

Recent research conducted by Internet Safety Labs, a nonprofit that advocates for software safety, concluded that 78% of required or recommended school apps were “very high risk” in terms of privacy, and 79% of the apps collected student location data. The research looked at 663 U.S. schools and analyzed 1,357 commonly required or recommended school apps.

The findings were particularly troubling for schools in socioeconomically challenged areas. Even though these schools generally used less technology overall, the ones observed had the highest rate of “unsafe apps with digital ads," and "apps with behavioral ads."

“We originally surmised that the lower the number of apps, the safer it would be, except they kind of blew that out of the water because they had some of the lowest numbers of technologies but unfortunately those technologies were more likely to have ads,” says Lisa LeVasseur, executive director and research director for Internet Safety Labs.

Despite this bleak overall picture, there is good news. Recommended strategies for better protecting student privacy are available, and some are free, LeVasseur says. 

Free and Immediate Steps Schools Can Take To Better Protect Student Privacy  

LeVasseur knows that school budgets can vary widely. “We understand that a lot of these school districts are very small -- we looked at one where the superintendent was the webmaster,” LeVasseur says. 

That’s why Internet Safety Labs has recommendations that don’t require funding. These include limiting the overall amount of tech tools used in a district -- even though this recent study didn’t necessarily see a connection between less recommended apps and better student privacy protection, LeVasseur says. 

“We still say practice minimization," she says. "We found on average schools were recommending 20 apps or technologies.” LaVasseur adds this is inherently a lot for students and their parents to manage, and using fewer apps makes monitoring to meet privacy standards easier. 

In addition, LaVasseur and Internet Safety Labs recommend districts do the following: 

• Verify technology COPPA Safe Harbor Certified. This can be done through the FTC’s Safe Harbor site as well as others, including iKeepSafe.org, my.privo.com, and KidSafesealcom.  
• Examine website risks using the EFF’s Privacy Badger, or The Markup’s Blacklight tools
•  Examine apps using Internet Safety Labs’ App Microscope Tool  

What Schools With More Time and Funds Can Do 

LeVasseur says every school should plan to develop a technology vetting process and recognize that they need a process for “off the shelf” tools in addition to any existing processes they might have in place for licensed technology. 

“We saw some schools with procedures where if you wanted to recommend something as a teacher, you had to submit it to a process and it had to be approved before a teacher could do that. That’s very good practice,” LeVasseur says. 

Beyond having a school vetting process in place, schools with funding available should create a dedicated software management position specifically to look at these technologies. 

"The gold standard, we would say, is to have a dedicated resource who is endowed with the power to produce the process and manage the vetting process,” LeVasseur says. “It's a unique skill set. It's not hardware procurement. This is more software vendor management, creating criteria for safety for privacy and security, and other considerations.” 

LeVasseur believes these positions will start to be added in districts going forward. “I think we're going to see this more and more, especially with the increase in school hacking going on. These things go a little bit hand-in-glove because that person could be educated to watch over and mandate both privacy and security requirements.” 

• Creating A Comprehensive Cybersecurity Plan For Schools
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In both our training as educators and in teaching children, we are well-schooled (yes, that’s a pun) in research. Some of us can remember struggling to get our bibliography written correctly, never quite getting it right. Finding research to support our work used to be laborious until being able to “Google it” became a thing. Now it’s easier, but still hit or miss.

Enter today’s world of AI research, with many AI chatbots and other resource tools bubbling up with claims of superiority. This reminds many of us of the online tools that entered the market in the 1990s in that many came and went while others started charging in ways that created the freemium model. We are in that phase now with AI, and it would be beneficial to identify some of the tools that seem to have staying power, and are not as well known as others.

We have all heard of ChatGPT, which I often refer to as “the Xerox of the AI world.” (When a noun becomes a verb, as in, “I’m going to xerox that page” or now, “I’m going to ChatGPT or Google it,” that is the standard.) Yet there are other tools that offer free levels of access and produce invaluable results. ChatGPT also doesn’t reference sources, but rather consolidates information for you without sharing where it gathered this information. 

Here are three useful research tools that tell you where these found the information, with a basic explanation of each.

Perplexity 

When Jeff Bezos backs something, you can bet it’s going to be a decent platform, and Perplexity answers the call. The user enters a prompt, such as “Why does bullying peak in middle school?” Perplexity provides a paragraph response to the inquiry by drawing information from various sources, then generates a detailed outline and gathers supporting details. Citations and sources are provided, both in a simple summary above the outline, and in footnotes throughout, to easily go back and check. 

Perplexity pulls from a vast range of sources, so these may be as formal as a scholarly journal, to something as informal as a Reddit response. Being aware of this helps the user to keep a trained eye on the reliability of the source. The AI also operates like other chatbots in its ability to sustain an ongoing conversation if you are continuing to refine your search and weed out unnecessary or less desirable information. 

The interface is user-friendly and while a professional fee-based version exists, the free version is sufficient for research efforts. You can even create saved collections of your work to go back to. Perplexity also offers a mobile app version for your phone, and a Chrome extension, making it easily accessible.

Consensus 

A major advantage of Consensus is that it analyzes peer-reviewed research papers using AI. Scientific research from scholarly journals, such as The Journal of Behavioral Science, are provided, with a one-sentence overview of the research evidence, and an index of options from most likely to least (like a google search) is prioritized with each subsequent source. Therefore, you don’t see a paragraph AI output such as Perplexity’s outline, but you know the evidence is direct from a scholarly journal, highlighted by the sentence overview. You can filter the time-range (above the result) to provide more recent, or within a time range. 

Consensus also provides APA, MLA, and other format citation references for easy copy-and-paste into a bibliography. Because it is an AI search tool, the burden of exact keyword matching is lifted. Its simple interface is reliable: all findings are tied to actual studies, and sources are cited. Additionally, a unique link to your specific research query can be copied for later access, as here with the prompt, “Why does bullying peak in middle school?” 

Elicit 

Like Consensus, Elicit’s AI interface is designed to analyze the results from scholarly journals. Its simplicity also makes for a user-friendly navigation process. My search for the above on bullying in middle school turned up this. 

Other similar features include the ability to filter a time-range (underneath the result). Similar to Perplexity, Elicit provides a paragraph response to your prompt, and footnotes the supporting research. This is a kind of useful blend of Perplexity and Consensus.

One difference from Consensus is that there is no simple mechanism to grab an APA- or MLA-cited reference. You’ll have to use a tool such as this one to plug in cited information for creation. Upgraded options you can pay for are available, but like the others, the free model offers what I need to do my research.

What I like about all of these tools is their ability to generate a unique link back to the evidence found, for later access and follow up research. This essentially means you don’t have to start over, or worry about storing your citation evidence somewhere for fear it will be lost.

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• How School Leaders Can Address the Inequities of the AI Digital Divide

Write this down: Writing by hand may be more beneficial to brain development and learning than typing. 

This is according to a new study that builds on past research suggesting a greater cognitive benefit for handwriting vs. typing, and provides more evidence to support a growing movement to require the teaching of handwriting in many states. For the study, EEG data for 36 university students was recorded as they were asked to write down words they were shown on a laptop. 

“Only when students were writing given words by hand with a digital pen on a touchscreen, did we find widespread brain connectivity in large parts of the brain,” says Audrey van der Meer, study co-author and rain researcher and Professor of Neuropsychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. “When they typed on a keyboard, on the other hand, the brain was much less active, and as a result, there was no need for the brain to communicate between its active parts, resulting in little to no neural connections.” 

Writing By Hand vs. Typing: What Previous Research Says 

In a 2020 study, van der Meer and her colleagues found evidence that students were more primed for learning when they wrote by hand by examining and comparing brain scans of participants when they wrote vs. typed. The use of pen and paper gives the brain more “hooks” to hang memories on van der Meer told Tech & Learning after that study was published. The new study builds on that research and adds to the evidence supporting the benefits of student handwriting. 

In addition to these studies looking at brain scans, there is also more direct evidence of a difference between writing by hand and typing. For a 2014 study, researchers asked students to watch TED talks, in which half of them took handwritten notes and the other half took notes on a PC with a keyboard. “Students had similar scores on the exam on factual questions, but students who took notes by hand performed significantly better than those who typed on conceptual, inferential, and implication questions,” van der Meer says of the research, with which she was not involved. 

However, as with many other topics in education, the question isn't fully settled. Research published in 2019 attempted to duplicate the findings of the 2014 study and didn't find significant differences between keyboard and handwritten notetakers.  

Policy Implications

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards de-emphasized cursive writing instruction in the U.S. and handwriting education waned in the following years. By 2016, just 14 states required schools to teach cursive writing, however, that number has creeped back up ever since. Now more than 20 states require some form of cursive instruction by law. California became the most recent state to pass such a law this fall. 

Some see these efforts as a backlash against technology in schools while some of the rationale behind the movement to require cursive has been puzzling. California Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, who led the passage of California’s recent cursive law, argued this type of education was necessary so students could read historic documents written in cursive. But is lack of cursive knowledge really the main thing keeping students from conducting primary source historical research? And AI tools already exist that can read cursive for students. 

Even so, there is a solid scientific rationale for these policies, van der Meer says. Twenty U.S. states have used her and her colleagues' 2020 paper to justify the decision to reinstate handwriting education requirements. 

Pro-Handwriting Isn't Anti-Technology  

Van der Meer does not like how research into the benefits of handwriting is labeled as anti-technology. 

“We are often misinterpreted and accused of wanting to go back to the stone age. But it is obvious that we live in a digital world that is here to stay,” she says. “Our findings show that handwriting is excellent brain stimulation, especially for the young developing brain, because the precise forming of the letters requires fine motor control and sensory support. Therefore, more of the brain is active and the brain is in need of communicating between its active parts by forming neural connections between them." 

That's why she recommends all students receive some level of handwritten instruction. But she maintains this does not have to come at the cost of education in technology. 

Beyond the brain connectivity benefit of handwriting, van der Meer believes cursive has other benefits. “We see handwriting as part of our cultural heritage and feel it would be a shame if the next generation cannot write a poem or love letter by hand, or a grocery list at the very least,” she says. 

• Tech Tools Can Provide Pre-Made Flashcards. That's Not a Good Thing Says New Research
• It’s Counterintuitive But Pretesting Consistently Works, Says Research

Using a tech tool that provides premade flashcards is not the best way for students to prepare for a test, according to new research. 

In five out of six experiments, researchers found that participants, who were undergraduate college students, learned more when they generated their own flashcards than when they used premade flashcards, and in some cases, a lot more. 

“A typical advantage was about 10% better test performance, which is roughly equivalent to a letter grade,” says Steven C. Pan, the lead author of this research on flashcard use published in December in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

In one experiment, participants who generated flashcards on their own performed 25% better than those who used premade flashcards. This research leaves no doubt in Pan’s mind that students are better off making their own. 

“If a student uses an existing flashcard set, then they are robbing themselves of the learning opportunities that can arise from making their own flashcard sets,” says Pan, who is the director of the Learning Sciences Laboratory at the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. 

Why Are Student-Generated Flashcards More Effective? 

“Probably the biggest reason is that generating flashcards provides opportunities to engage in generative learning activities,” Pan says. “Generative learning activities require learners to curate, organize, or elaborate upon the information that is to be learned. Doing so can provide opportunities for extra cognitive processing of that information, which helps learning.” 

This didn’t happen for students in Pan’s experiment who studied premade flashcards. “There was no need to engage in any generative learning at all,” he says. “That resulted in a more passive approach to learning which was usually less effective.” 

What Does This Mean For Flashcard Generating Tools?  

Many digital tools offer premade flashcard sets, while AI tools can also make flashcards on demand. The thinking is that by eliminating the time spent generating flashcards, students will be able to focus on studying, but that logic might be flawed. 

"Avoiding the need to generate one's own flashcards is often touted as an advantage of online flashcard platforms. It now appears that advantage is greatly overstated,” Pan says. 

However, some digital platforms let users generate their own flashcards, which may be a better way for students to utilize these tools. “Our research suggests that an effective way to use tools like Quizlet is to generate one's own flashcards first, then practice with them,” Pan says. 

Additionally, premade digital flashcard sets can vary in quality. “In some cases, they are very well made, but in other cases, they contain inaccuracies or even outright misinformation,” Pan says. “That raises another potential advantage of generating one's own flashcards: quality control.” 

What About Paper vs. Digital Flashcards?

“There is an ongoing debate regarding whether reading on paper versus digitally is better for learning,” Pan says. “Although we did not specifically compare paper versus digital flashcards, the most important factor appears to be whether students generate the content on the cards or not.” 

However, by their nature, paper flashcards have to be self-generated by students. “In that sense, by using paper flashcards, one may be less susceptible to the temptation to use pre-generated flashcard sets,” Pan says. 

Any Tips for Creating Effective Flashcards? 

Part of what Pan’s research sought to untangle was which methods for creating flashcards were most effective, and looked at several different flashcard generation methods, including copying-and-pasting, paraphrasing, and example generation. 

"Paraphrasing, turned out to be the most effective, beating even example generation," he says. 

The least effective was copy-and-paste, in which students transcribed what was written in a textbook word for word. This was the only method studied in which generating flashcards didn’t provide a significant advantage. “That approach required devoting time and effort to the act of transcribing, which does not appear to be a very productive learning activity, plus did not involve learners coming up with their own content,” Pan says. 

Teachers can encourage their students to make the most of these findings by making their own flashcards and putting the information into their own words as they do. 

“Instead of transcribing information directly from a textbook or other source, students should study that information, try to understand it, and then, based on what they now know, generate original content, in their own words, for their flashcards,” he says. “Then, using those flashcards, they can engage in retrieval practice, self-testing, followed by checking the correct answers.” 

• It’s Counterintuitive But Pretesting Consistently Works, Says Research
• Quizlet: How To Teach With It

Socorro Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, like many school districts, has long had trouble filling open positions.

“When you've got young teachers graduating from teacher schools, Socorro is not a place that is going to attract them,” says Ron Hendrix, superintendent of the small district with just more than 1,500 students. “There's no nightlife, there's really not anything to pull them here when they could go to Albuquerque, which is an hour away.” 

In recent years, the district would regularly start the school year with multiple open positions unfilled. To combat these vacancies the district adopted an increasingly common recruitment tool among rural districts around the country: a 4-day school week. Schools that adopt this non-traditional school week run slightly longer schedules for four days, with teachers and students having one day off (usually Friday).  

Between 1999 and 2019 the number of districts offering 4-day school weeks grew from 108 to 662.  By the 2022-23 school year, the number of 4-day districts had ballooned to 876 in the U.S.  

In the past, a switch to the 4-day school week was often motivated by a desire to save funds, but research indicates that district savings from the change are minimal. Today, the shift to a 4-day school schedule is being motivated by staffing concerns as well as an effort to improve the well-being of students and teachers. 

“We’re seeing continued growth of the policy by school districts hoping to use the schedule to attract and retain teachers, which is a shift from the previous, largely financial rationale,” says Dr. Emily Morton, a Researcher at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes of Research.  

However, the impact of the schedule change on these factors, as well as academics, is still being debated and studied. 

4-Day School Schedule Bright Spots 

In a study of 4-day schools in Oklahoma,  Morton found that bullying incidents were reduced by 39 percent per pupil and fighting incidents were down by 31 percent per pupil. “Some of that's mechanical,” Morton says. “Students are there less, so of course, the incidents you would expect to see go down as well.”

However, decreased time in the school buildings doesn’t tell the whole story, as students at 4-day schools are only in school 18 percent less time on average. “So there's something else going on there that's a benefit,” Morton says. 

The schedule is also tremendously popular with students and parents according to surveys conducted as part of a Rand Corporation report comparing 4-day to 5-day school weeks. 

“The approval ratings for the 4-day school week are off the charts,” says Morton, who is also a co-author of the Rand report. “[Parents and students] really love it, and they say that morale is up at school. Kids are feeling more rested. The school climate is better.” 

However, when researchers compare the responses of students from 4-day schools to traditional 5-day schools, there is not great evidence of a difference in overall morale. “Parents and students are saying that that's something that's happening, but exactly how that's working and how different it is from a 5-day school week, it's hard for us to know at this point,” Morton says. 

 4-Day School Schedule Concerns  

The Rand report on 4-day school weeks found that while student test scores generally stayed the same or improved at 4-day schools, scores tended to improve at a slower rate than similar schools with a traditional 5-day schedule. The study examined state standardized tests in grades 3-8 in math and English Language Arts between 2011 and 2019 in Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Alaska, and South Dakota. 

“Both 4-day school weeks and our comparison 5-day school week districts either stayed the same or grew in test performance during our time period, but 5-day school week districts grew faster,” says Christopher Joseph Doss, a policy researcher at Rand Corporation a co-author of the report. “Effectively, student achievement in math and ELA in our study was hurt by the 4-day school week policy because if the districts did not adopt the policy, the students would likely have scored even better.” 

The differences between 4- and 5-day schools was small each year but added up over time. “By the end of our 8-year period, these small yearly differences added up to a meaningful difference. Students were 0.15 to 0.20 standard deviations behind their counterparts in 5-day school week districts,” Doss says. 

A more recent preprint, which means it has not been peer-reviewed, co-authored by Morton, also found that the 4-day school schedule did not have a positive impact on academics. 

“The paper arguably provides the best analysis of the impact of four-day school weeks on student academics to date and finds small, negative impacts of the schedule on students’ spring reading test scores and their school year gains in math and reading,” Morton says. 

The negative effects were larger in towns and suburbs. “The impacts of rural four-day school weeks on school year gains are also negative on average for math and reading, but they are comparatively quite small and not statistically significant,” she adds.

Beyond these academic concerns, there are also questions about the schedule’s practicality in many districts. “The 4-day school week is very popular among smaller and more rural districts,” Doss says. “Many people we interviewed in the rural districts either have grandparents that can take care of the kids, were able to rearrange work schedules, or shared childcare with neighboring families. Whether these arrangements are possible in suburban or urban districts is unknown.” 

4-Day Schedule In Practice 

At Socorro Consolidated Schools, the four-day schedule is working well, Hendrix says. Student graduation rates have increased and open positions are more easily filled. Fridays are used for sports and other extracurricular activities, but the school building stays open with supplementary educational offerings for children who don’t have other childcare options. While teachers are not required to work, they’re encouraged to offer Friday classes based on their passions. For example, a teacher might teach a class on sewing over a few weeks. 

“My teachers and my students, it seems like the morale and the energy level in the school is so much better now because they all know Fridays off,” he says. Hendrix would even take things a step further and would like to see a four-day schedule go community-wide among town employees and many businesses. “I think it'd be amazing, especially if you got a small to midsize town where everybody has worked hard for four days, and then you've got a long weekend.”

Despite the four-day schedule’s success and popularity at Socorro Consolidated Schools, the district may soon be forced to resume a standard five-day schedule as New Mexico is one of many states rethinking the four-day schedule. “Oklahoma passed legislation banning it but allows districts to apply for a waiver to be eligible to use it based on a variety of factors including test scores,” Morton says. “Missouri and Texas debated banning it this year.” 

Hendrix vehemently opposes a proposal in the legislature to eliminate four-day schools in New Mexico and says if the district is forced to return to a five-day schedule he will lose about 50 percent of his teachers. “So I will probably retire,” he says. 

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All too often education research is chronically absent from the classroom. According to a 2019 survey, only about 16 percent of teachers use research to inform their practice decisions. 

Torrey Trust, professor of Learning Technology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, devotes time to understanding the causes of the research-practice divide and has developed strategies that classroom educators and researchers can implement to overcome it. 

Here are some key takeaways from that work. 

Why Is There a Research-Practice Divide?  

“Far too often scholars conduct research in K-12 schools as ‘outside experts’ who come in and collect data and analyze it,” Trust says. “They rarely collaborate with K-12 teachers during the research process. Then, they take that data from K-12 schools and publish their work in top-tier scholarly journals, which often hide research articles behind paywalls that K-12 teachers do not have access to or cannot afford.” 

These papers are then presented at academic conferences for other scholars, not K-12 teachers, Trust says. 

On the other side of the equation, while teachers do receive some training in analyzing research, they often don’t have the time to sift through jargon-filled articles. 

“I really think there is a need for teacher-education programs to incorporate opportunities for current and future teachers to learn how to critically read and examine research,” she says. “Otherwise, we end up with schools promoting things like growth mindset, grit, and learning styles, and making purchasing decisions without realizing the research on these topics is fallible." 

What Can Teachers Do Right Now to Bridge The Research-Practice Divide? 

“I'd recommend that K-12 teachers select a topic they are interested in, like maybe ChatGPT in education, then go to Google Scholar and setup an alert to get an email when a new study is published on that topic,” Trust says. “I do this for several topics and it's amazing to have the research just pop up in my inbox rather than having to go look for it.” 

Trust adds that educators can learn a lot even if they just read the titles and abstracts that are included in the Google Scholar Alert emails.

Beyond this, more can be done to support teachers as they try to stay on top of the latest research. “I think that educators need time, training, and support to learn how to critically read research and determine if/how to change their practice based on the research they read,” she says. “This could be done in research-based professional learning communities within schools or districts.” 

What Can Researchers Do?  

While there are many different steps researchers can take to better disseminate their work, the first step Trust advises is also the easiest. “Write titles and abstracts for journal articles that are easy to understand,” she says. “Oftentimes, K-12 teachers just look at those two aspects of a journal, especially if it is behind a paywall. I see far too many research articles published with super-long, jargony titles that do not sound appealing at all to read, but actually have really important information for teachers.” 

Next, Trust suggests researchers look for ways to present their work at conferences that K-12 teachers attend, such as ISTE, NSTA, NCTE, and CUE, as well as through webinars. They should also promote their work on social media and by writing practitioner-focused articles or blog posts. 

“I try to publish my work in at least one top-tier journal because it's looked highly upon by my colleagues and university, and then I try to write either a practitioner-oriented journal article, an open access journal article that all K-12 teachers have access to, or a blog or other type of post to share the work broadly,” she says. “I know a lot of scholars don't like self-promoting, but it is really essential to get their work out more broadly.” 

What Are Other Ways to Foster More Collaboration Between Classroom Teachers and Researchers? 

Because education is so context-specific, even a “proven” teaching method might not work in certain instances. 

“For example, a new digital tool works, but only in a class where all students have Chromebooks and high-speed wifi at home,” Trust says. “So, even if a research study says something works, it might not work for every K-12 teacher. That can be a point of frustration if K-12 teachers are turning to research for advice.” 

She adds, “I think, to remedy this, we need all K-12 teachers to become active researchers who collect data from their own classes and work with scholars at local universities to analyze, make sense of, and publish the data. This keeps K-12 teachers in the loop, empowers them to become researchers, and starts to bridge the research-practice divide.” 

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A group of Stanford researchers recently decided to put AI detectors to the test, and if it was a graded assignment, the detection tools would have received an F. 

“Our main finding is that current AI detectors are not reliable in that they can be easily fooled by changing prompts,” says James Zou, a Stanford professor and co-author of the paper based on the research. More significantly, he adds, “They have a tendency to mistakenly flag text written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated.” 

This is bad news for those educators who have embraced AI detection sites as a necessary evil in the AI era of teaching. Here’s everything you need to know about how this research into bias in AI detectors was conducted and its implications for teachers.  

How was this AI detection research conducted?  

Zou and his co-authors were aware of the interest in third-party tools to detect whether text was written by ChatGPT or another AI tool, and wanted to scientifically evaluate any tool's efficacy. To do that, the researchers evaluated seven unidentified but “widely used” AI detectors on 91 TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) essays from a Chinese forum and 88 U.S. eighth-grade essays from the Hewlett Foundation’s ASAP dataset. 

What did the research find?  

The performance of these detectors on students who spoke English as a second language was, to put it in terms no good teacher would ever use in their feedback to a student, atrocious. 

The AI detectors incorrectly labeled more than half of the TOEFL essays as “AI-generated” with an average false-positive rate of 61.3%. While none of the detectors did a good job correctly identifying the TOEFL essays as human-written, there was a great deal of variation. The study notes: “All detectors unanimously identified 19.8% of the human-written TOEFL essays as AI-authored, and at least one detector flagged 97.8% of TOEFL essays as AI-generated.” 

The detectors did much better with those who spoke English as their first language but were still far from perfect. “On 8th grade essays written by students in the U.S., the false positive rate of most detectors is less than 10%,” Zou says. 

Why are AI detectors more likely to incorrectly label writing from non-native English speakers as AI-written?  

Most AI detectors attempt to differentiate between human- and AI-written text by assessing a sentence’s perplexity, which Zou and his co-authors define as “a measure of how ‘surprised’ or ‘confused’ a generative language model is when trying to guess the next word in a sentence.” 

The higher the perplexity and more surprising text is, the more likely it was written by a human, at least in theory. This theory, the study authors conclude, seems to break down somewhat when evaluating writing from non-native English speakers who generally “use a more limited range of linguistic expressions.” 

What are its implications for educators?  

The research suggests AI detectors are not ready for prime time, especially given the way these platforms inequitably flag content as AI written, and could potentially exacerbate existing biases against non-native English-speaking students. 

“I think educators should be very cautious about using current AI detectors given its limitations and biases,” Zou says. “There are ways to improve AI detectors. However, it's a challenging arms race because the large language models are also becoming more powerful and flexible to emulate different human writing styles.” 

In the meantime, Zou advises educators to take other steps to try and prevent the use of AI to cheat by students. “One approach is to teach students how to use AI responsibly,” he says. “More in-person discussions and assessments could also help.” 

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PowerNotes is a tool that allows students and teachers to take and collate information from online sources, with ease.

The idea behind this tool is to allow for many sources of information to be collected and stored in one place. This can then be amended and sorted to help with organizing those notes. That all makes for a useful tool for building up projects of information.

Since this works as a simple Google Chrome extension, it is very easy to access and can be used across devices for seamless use in school and beyond the classroom on personal devices. 

So is PowerNotes a tool that could help your class? This guide aims to lay out all you need to know.

What is PowerNotes?

PowerNotes is a Chrome browser extension that allows you to highlight and collect notes from sources across the internet.

PowerNotes uses these snippets, as it calls these, to offer you easy to organize sources of information. Usefully, it also cites where each one came from so you can build a wide range of sources and easily reference it all at the end.

This is a powerful research tool for students, but thanks to very in-depth analysis for teachers, it can also be ideal to guide students on how to best research when working on projects and beyond. Lots of guidance is also available for students to help them get the best out of this system.

Everything is very easy to use and is self-explanatory enough for teachers to be able to add this to their tool kit, without having to invest a lot of time into learning how to use this -- or to teach students how to do so.

How does PowerNotes work?

PowerNotes is a free (initially) to download and install Chrome extension that can be accessed from the web or the Google Chrome Store, so it will work across devices with the Chrome browser installed. 

Once an area of text is highlighted, when on a website, this can then be saved to standard or personally customized topic sections. Think of it as having folders into which certain types of information can be placed -- getting organized in collecting data right from the outset, so there's less to sort out later.

All these snippets go into the Project Outline section in which students can rearrange this information easily by simply dragging and dropping as needed. Filters are also available here, allowing you to arrange by topic or annotation for example, for quick searching and organizing of notes.

Usefully, this has citations right there, so it's easy to quickly see how much information is coming from one source, for example, so as to ensure a broader range of sources can be included as needed. An option to collaborate is available, allowing for group work in which research is shared across the groups.

What are the best PowerNotes features?

PowerNotes is super simple to use and can be scaled as needed, so it can work for younger students yet is also a viable tool for use right into college years and beyond. 

Teachers get some great feedback, such as the above pie chart, which shows how students are using the software. This can help in providing feedback and guidance, or spotting areas of struggle, so teaching can follow with direct guidance.

Usefully, there is an option to offer real-time feedback to students that gives teachers the opportunity to provide support, class-wide, as students work on researching. A helpful project timer feature gives an idea of the amount of actual time students have spent researching. 

A powerful plagiarism prevention system is in place here as well as the ability to create citations that build to a bibliography. Although, this may need some refining and guidance to fit the exact format required by the testing body.

AI tools are available in the paid version, which lets you summarize articles, offer real-time related topics, prompts for Q&A, and more.

Usefully, this lets you integrate into current LMS setups as well as work with both Google search results and library database data. This can all work without the need to leave PowerNotes, with access to librarians from right there inside the system.

How much does PowerNotes cost?

PowerNotes can be downloaded and used in its basic form for a free trail period, but there is also a premium version with extra features available.

The Free trial version lasts 14-days and gets you a solo account with unlimited use. This then jumps to $10 per month or $99 annually. For that, you get unlimited topics, projects, PDF OCR pages, plus project collaboration and basic user support.

Go for the Classroom plan, at $79 for six months, or $99 for the year, and you get up to 35 users, enhanced user support, group projects, engagement insights, proxy compatibility, implementation support, and classroom training.

The Custom option for institutions is charged at a bespoke rate, which gets you Insight for Academic integrity, Brainstorm AI Access, Discovery AI Access, LMS integration, Springshare integration, webinars and events, custom SSO options, plus customized training. 

PowerNotes best tips and tricks

Start simple
Spend a class teaching students how the tool works, perhaps giving a small research example for them to go away and work on.

Set a project
Once students have the idea of it, set a project in which they can produce a final essay using the research and citations from PowerNotes.

Defeat plagiarism
Show students how this tool can help stop plagiarism so that they know what it is, how to avoid it, and why they won't get away with trying it.

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A new study finds that students who read print texts understand the content better than those who read the same text on a handheld digital device such as a tablet. The findings could have implications for how digital devices are used in schools, says Ladislao Salmerón, the study’s lead author. 

Salmerón, a professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Valencia in Spain, says the research came out of a concern that massive digitalization of reading in schools may lead to difficulties that must be understood and properly addressed.

The study comparing print texts to text read on handheld digital devices was recently published in The Journal of Educational Psychology. Here is what you need to know about it. 

What is The Significance of the Print vs. Digital Device Research?  

The advantage of print texts over digital ones has been seen in many previous studies, and education psychologists even have a name for the phenomenon: the “screen inferiority effect.” However, by and large, prior studies had compared print readings to reading on a computer screen, not the handheld devices that modern students use for most of their reading. 

Salmerón and his colleagues wanted to see if the screen inferiority effect occurs if you focused on handheld devices vs. print. To answer that, they searched existing studies and performed an analysis focused on only data sets comparing print reading to handheld devices. 

Ultimately, they looked at dozens of studies, pooling results from more than 100,000 students. As with previous research, they found students who read print consistently performed slightly better. 

While small, Salmerón notes, the effect observed is statistically significant and could have large implications. “In interpreting this we must consider that children in schools read every day, so this effect could be accumulated over time,” he says. 

Why Is Reading Print More Effective? 

The reasons for the screen inferiority effect are not fully understood. 

One possibility is called the shallowing hypothesis, which assumes that when reading on digital devices people are generally doing so for short periods of time and reading short pieces of text. This, the hypothesis holds, favors a browsing state of mind and causes people to be less cognitively efficient when reading on devices. 

Another theory holds that the tactile nature of reading, feeling each page, and remembering whether it was at the beginning of the book or the end, helps provide more information cues to connect with your memory. 

Neither theory has been proven. “We still don’t know what causes the screen inferiority effect,” Salmerón says. He adds, research is necessary to understand it. “This is essential if we want to prevent such inferiority from happening.” 

What Are The Larger Implications of the Research?  

This study has direct implications for educators, Salmerón says. “First, printed texts should not be abandoned. Second, educators should consider the goals of the tasks when deciding which reading medium to use.” He adds, “Tablets may be well-suited for internet inquiry tasks, but paper should be preferred when promoting comprehension of long texts.” 

Salmeron says he is not anti-technology, and is working with fellow researchers to try and better understand the screen inferiority effect. “We are trying to envision ways to improve comprehension by means of digital tools,” he says. 

Even so, he says it is harder for him and his colleagues to receive funding because it is often work that does not show a benefit for technology. In addition, he is often criticized by edtech enthusiasts who claim he has an old-fashioned perspective on literacy. 

“My response is that we should not ignore evidence, and should not discard practices that have been proven to be useful such as print reading,” he says.  

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Daniel T. Willingham is not your typical TikTok star. The mild-mannered psychology professor at the University of Virginia doesn’t share recipes, exercise tips, or make funny videos featuring animals. Instead, he clearly and concisely provides evidence-based advice for students and educators on how they can work smarter not harder. 

This approach has resonated with viewers. 

One video advising college students on how not to fall behind in their work has garnered more than 2.5 million views so far, while other videos on his TikTok channel regularly earn tens of thousands of views. 

A leader in learning research, Willingham offers the same concise and clear-eyed advice for educators and students in his new book, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy.  

Here are four tips from the book. 

1. Smarter Learning Doesn’t Always Feel Good  

One barrier to more effective learning in humans is that the best strategies for learning don’t always feel intuitive. One example of this can be seen in pre-testing, which can be helpful for students even if they haven’t previously been exposed to the material. 

“If someone hands you a deck of flashcards and you try to answer the questions even though you've never seen the material before, that absolutely feels stupid because you’re just guessing, but you actually do get a little bit of a boost in learning when you do that,” Willingham says. 

This is just one of many examples, and instructors should remind students that good cognitive practices may feel like a waste of time even when it may be working, Willingham says. 

2. Listening to Lectures Shouldn't be Passive  

Students tend to treat direct instruction as if they were watching a movie or live performance, however, listening to a lecture should be more active than that. 

“Listening the way you listen when you're in a movie is not going to cut it,” Willingham says. “You need to be much more active, you need to be thinking, you need to be sort of reconstructing the organization of the lecture if you're really going to understand everything that you're meant to understand.” 

Teachers can help students do this by making sure the key points of the lecture are clear and reminding students to draw connections between various subtopics. For example, Willingham starts his lectures with a slide outlining the various topics he is going to discuss. Each time he moves to a new portion of the lecture, he returns to the original slide to show students where they are and help them make the necessary connections between material. 

3. Don’t Plan By Task 

Many students organize their study time by tasks, which may not be the most effective approach. “The problem with planning by task is that there is the planning fallacy, which is everybody, not just students but everybody, underestimates how long tasks are going to take to complete,” Willingham says. “So you think to yourself, ‘Oh, I've got a chemistry problem set due on Friday. But it's only Tuesday. I've got nothing else to do on Friday. So no problem. I'll do that Thursday night.’”

However, when Thursday night rolls around if the task takes longer than anticipated you might fall behind or be unable to complete it. In contrast, if you plan by time, you have built in a schedule that keeps you ahead of various assignments. Willingham’s short TikTok video sharing this advice has received more than 1 million views 

4. Create Good Study Habits 

Linked to planning by time is the idea of building study habits. Humans are creatures of habit so building in effective study habits can help your students stick with class material. 

Though he advises scheduling study sessions by time over task, Willingham says the timing of these study sessions should be based on specific triggers throughout the day rather than hard time starts. So instead of saying you’re going to study from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning, he recommends planning on studying an hour after breakfast. Students should also plan for challenges and distractions that come up and how they’re going to handle these. 

While many students might think in terms of streaks, Willingham says streaks will always be broken so it’s important to remember the key is to study most days, not every day. “The key to a habit is that this removes the decision of whether or not you're going to work,” Willingham says. “If you have a habit of brushing your teeth every night, you don't decide, ‘Oh yeah, that's a really good idea.’ You find yourself in the bathroom with the toothbrush in your mouth. And that's because it's become so habitual, you don't even think about it. That's the place you want to get to.” 

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CTRL-F comes from Canadian organization CIVIX, which is built around strengthening democracy by using education. In this case it is civic education to help kids become more fact-checking aware and boost critical thinking skills.

The idea is to educate young learning minds in the art of thinking about what they're being told. Rather than taking something at face value, they will learn to question and research facts.

While this system is aimed at grades 7 thru 12, it can appeal to more able younger kids and older students alike. Critical thinking and fact-checking are skills required in this digital age more than ever, so a dedicated platform to teach just that is a welcome addition to an educator's or guardian's tool kit.

What is CTRL-F?

CTRL-F is a digital learning platform that aims to make children better critical thinkers by using step-by-step guidance and activities.

Using a combination of written guidance, expert video, and direct instructions, the site enables educators to teach specific literacy-focused thinking, research, and examination.

Since much of the material is either available online or can be viewed as a PDF, via Google or Microsoft suites, everything can be accessed by most people. While there is a main program, there are also other activities available, including an example bank of scenarios, a virtual workshop, and a selection of skills development videos.

This also offers teacher-focused resources and training to make getting the most out of what is on offer as easy as possible. 

How does CTRL-F work?

CTRL-F requires you to sign-up to get the most out of the platform. This will then allow students to enter via the student-facing site. Teachers can enter their own section to plan, access resources, and set work.

CTRL-F offers four main lessons that progress in order, building as it goes. This works by offering an introduction section that encourages reflection before moving onto video guidance where experts explain more. Then there are instruction to follow in order put the new concepts into practice. 

Follow-up exercises as well as pre-assessment options are available to allow students to do more. As mentioned, there is also plenty in the example bank that allows students and teachers to search by skill, subject, and difficulty.

• Skills include: Investigate the Source, Evaluate Expertise, Check the Claim, and Trace the Information. 
• Subjects covered are: Pop Culture, Science, Climate Change, General, Covid 19, Politics/Current Events, History, and AI. Skills levels are Simple or Challenging.

Each of these can be checked to narrow down searches as refined or open as you need.

What are the best CTRL-F features?

CTRL-F uses real-world examples and media, which make it a very effective and engaging way to teach in a functional fashion.

Usefully, the resources available from CTRL-F can be accessed by students on their own, in groups, or as a class. Consequently, based on student abilities, the work can be set out as needed. In all cases it should lead to more independent and critical thinking. Thanks to lesson plans in PDF format and slide decks for the resources, everything is very self-explanatory and intuitive.

The media covered is mostly article-focused, however there is also an inclusion of videos and social posts -- allowing students to get relevant experience in source-hunting and research-testing for information sources of varying kinds. 

This isn't just about the content and how to research but also lays out a very real-world look at how media works and how certain people, companies, and governments can have a vested interest in controlling and manipulating what is being shared. Knowing this then allows students to see and think more clearly in a balanced way that ultimately leads them to truth.

How much does CTRL-F cost?

CTRL-F is all about helping young people learn to find the facts and that noble aim is paired with financial support from CIVIX, which is a non-partisan charity that offers all this for free.

While there is no advertising on the website and very few details are required to get up and running, the privacy policy isn't totally transparent so is worth keeping in mind -- as the website's very ethos would have you try to do.

CTRL-F best tips and tricks

Go home
After working on the basics, assign more follow-up practice at home in which students can use the example bank to hone their skills in fact-finding.

Feed it back
Go over the examples in class as a group to make sure everyone is understanding how this works, and see the varying paths to facts that might be taken.

Get social
Teach your own lessons using other sources such as Instagram and TikTok, in order to help students think factually in these less-clear spaces that require good judgement.

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Too often classes in education don’t consider the way humans actually learn, said Steve Oertle during a recent Tech & Learning webinar. 

“I find so many classes that folks take, bachelors, masters, doctoral . . . don’t consider the brain,” said Oertle, who is the assistant superintendent at Roxana CUSD #1 in Illinois. 

The webinar was hosted by Dr. Kecia Ray and also featured Chris Hull, a former classroom educator and current president and co-founder of Otus, a student growth platform.

Watch the full webinar here.

Key Takeaways 

Repetition and Repetition in Different Contexts

“Lesson number one from neurology is we need lots and lots of repetition in anything that we do to have the best shot at it being permanent,” Oertle said. 

“The second lesson in terms of neurology, really is those multiple repetitions that come in learning should come in a variety of different contexts. In other words, if you're constantly saying something the same exact way and that is the sort of repetition you get, you're building a really strong neural-to-neural connection but there's only one way in and one way out.” 

Providing repetition in different contexts will strengthen neural connections and give students more ways to access the knowledge, Oertle said. “So they've got an on-ramp here and an on-ramp here and an on-ramp here, so that no matter how they come to whatever that skill is, or that knowledge is, they have a myriad of ways to connect to that super-fast highway that we've built through repetition.” 

The Four Stages of Learning 

Cognitive scientists have found that learning happens primarily in four stages:

Experience. “Learning has to start with some sort of experience and that is brought into you through your five senses,” Oertle said. 

Process, Organize. “You bring a new experience in, your brain has to be able to file and organize that information in terms of, 'What do I do with this? Do I purge it? Is it important? Is it relevant? What do I know from my past that I can actually file this against in terms of my past experiences?'” 

Synthesize, Hypothesize, Plan. “Once that information is organized based upon your prior experience or your prior knowledge, you move to the frontal lobe, which is really where we synthesize, analyze, and hypothesize. What are we going to do with this information? If it's relevant, how am I going to use it?” Oertle said. 

Apply, Test/Experiment. After new knowledge has gone through the first three steps, it is time for a learner to assess how they will use this knowledge, Oertle said. “I'm going to test it. I'm going to write something, I'm going to explain something. I'm going to present something. I'm going to attempt a skill.” 

The final testing process provides a new experience that causes the student to reflect and starts the whole process over again, Oertle says. 

Active Learning and Data 

Otus is designed to facilitate efficient learning. “Learning is an act that requires effort,” Hull said. “We really gather the information about a kid, we visualize it so it can be acted upon. So the focus can be on learning. That's what my focus was as a teacher.” 

This data can help power other important teaching strategies such as active learning that promotes student voice and choice. “The more choice you can have, the more empowered learners are,” Oertle said. “There is a lot of research out there that points to high-effect exercises when students are the ones doing the talking and doing the doing as opposed to the teacher talking. Unfortunately, there's also research out there that is the non-exemplar that shows that 80% to 90% of most classrooms, at least in the United States are teacher voice. That's a lot of teacher's voice.” 

This is one of many areas in which educators can use more science-based practices in their teaching. “Potentially, the students aren't doing as much learning as they could be if they were the ones discussing talking and having voice and choice in the classroom,” Oertle said. 

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Wikipedia is one of the most well-known sources of free information on the internet. This remains a volunteer-run and free online encyclopedia of resources that are made available to all.

It is the largest and most read reference work in history, claims the site itself. In 2022 it was ranked as the fifth most popular website in the world. It was started in 2001 and available in English only; it is now available in more than 329 languages.

With more than 60 million articles available across the Wikipedia world, it can be a very valuable resource for teachers and students. But with the threat of inaccuracies on this volunteer-run and -monitored platform, is it right for your education institution?

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia as a name comprises wiki and encyclopedia, and as this suggests, offers quick and easy to access facts and figures on a host of different topics.

The website is easy to access across various devices as it uses mostly text with a few small images to keep data usage to a minimum. The content is generally as concise as possible, focusing on defining the subject matter initially and going into more detail under sub-headings that allow you to navigate the page easily.

Everything is cited, usually, with links that allow you to check any of the sources or claims. So even if this site can be considered less than perfectly accurate at times, you can do your own fact-checking to make sure what you're reading is valid.

It is worth keeping in mind that while there can be useful facts for students, nothing is age filtered and there can be damaging and inappropriate material on the website also, so a monitored approach is necessary.

How does Wikipedia work?

Wikipedia is written and maintained by the public and volunteers. While anyone can add an entry on a topic of their choosing, it will then be flagged for checking by an army of approved moderators. As such, the level of truth and accuracy is far better than when it first started. Anything incorrect is usually quickly spotted and amended.

Wikipedia offers a democratized look at knowledge, as free from biases as possible or advertising influences. The site runs on the donations of those who use it in order to pay for the servers to keep it up as well as helping volunteers as needed.

With 300,000+ active editors and more than 105 million active users, this is a rich and up-to-speed source of information. However, the site uses a 'procrastination' model so it waits until there is a problem before fixing it. 

Various ways to fix articles are available, and these change based on the country policy. Generally, editors can make changes while some more vandalized articles require more than one editor to sign-off a change.

What are the best Wikipedia features?

Wikipedia is super easy to access and a very fast website so even on older devices or slower internet connections, information can still be accessed.

The ability to teach students how to check facts is a fantastic feature of Wikipedia. Students should be guided to question everything they read and research the source links to make sure what they are reading is backed up with facts.

The site has great linking within articles too, allowing certain concepts or words to be linked so these too can be understood. This allows students to drill down and really understand a concept on all levels. The downside is that there can be an overwhelming amount of information and staying focused can be a challege.

Having students sign-up and create their own entries can be very rewarding as they see their knowledge on a certain subject can contribute to the global understanding.

How much does Wikipedia cost?

Wikipedia is run by volunteers and is funded by contributions. As such there is no advertising or tracking making it totally free to use and share.

Everything is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. 

The system is run on the custom-made MediaWiki, which is free open-source software written in PHP and based on the MySQL database system.

Wikipedia best tips and tricks

Research with tests
Find an article with either inaccuracies or debatable points and explain why that is so, allowing students to understand how to think about sources and accuracy.

Build your own
Make your own Wiki article with the class. Then, once they see how, have them create their own pieces based on any specialist subject they may have.

Write around
Have students write an assignment on a subject using Wikipedia but only reference original sources, without using Wikipedia in the written work they produce.

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Snopes is a fact-checking website that is famous for debunking common myths. But it is also a useful source for finding truth on the internet. As such it can be used by teachers and students in class.

Launched in 1994, this was originally an urban folklore website and has grown over the years into a go-to online resource for facts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the site had more than 237 fact-checking articles related this the issue of coronavirus truths and lies.

Snopes can serve as a useful resource for teachers to fact check but, perhaps more crucially, it is a useful tool to help students learn to question and find answers about less-than-clear issues. Taught correctly, this site can help students become better fact finders so they are able to navigate the murky online waters of the internet more adeptly on their own.

What is Snopes?

Snopes was originally a website setup and run by a husband and wife couple. It has since grown and developed into a platform for truth, debunking common misconceptions with facts.

From guides on how to be smart using social media to articles explaining how to avoid scams on Cyber Monday, right through to clarifying the Cookie Monster's real name -- the subject matter is hugely varied.

The site is not built with kids in mind, so educators and parents be warned, this is not for younger audiences. Even with older children, it should be a supervised experience. The site itself says: "Urban legends are expressions of adult fears and concerns and, as such, often convey those messages via stories that are unsuitable for children."

All that said, the content has varied a lot since that disclaimer went up several years back and there is now a lot of useful child-safe content available too.

How does Snopes work?

Snopes takes a common issue or story and clarifies the truth behind that by doing the research and then laying out the facts clearly in a way that is easy to read and check.

In a similar way to Wikipedia, Snopes articles are filled with plenty of source links so you can not only read what is being laid out but also fact check as you go. This in itself is a valuable way to teach kids that reading isn't believing when online and looking for source links -- as well as checking those -- are important parts of consuming media.

It's possible to browse by various categories including Latest, Top, Fact Checks, Collections, News, Archives, and a Randomizer. The stories themselves are laid out fairly uniformly, making it easy to navigate quickly.

What are the best Snopes features?

Snopes usefully lays out out a "True" logo with a tick, or "False" logo with a cross right at the start of the article, making it clear which way the argument is going to be made from the outset. This helps with clarity for younger readers and models well the argument for one side over another.

Usefully, each article provides the history of the claim before diving into the facts, a bit like bringing you up to speed. So even if students haven't heard of an issue, the site provides the background before arguing for or against the truth of it. 

All source links are helpfully included in-line so you can check as you read, making sure everything is properly backed up by facts. You then also have a references guide at the bottom of the article, clearly laying out all sources. 

An updates section is provided at the end of each article, making it clear if something has come to light chronologically after the piece itself was published. 

How much does Snopes cost?

Snopes is a free resource made available to all. It does have advertisements on the website, which help to fund the staff and cover operational costs.

Personal data is not required as this site can be accessed immediately without inputting anything to get everything that is available to read.

Snopes best tips and tricks

Show and tell
Have students bring a story each week, explaining what has been debunked, how, and why you found that interesting in relation to the class.

Create your own
Make a fun story about the class and its students, including links to sources to show how these articles are written.

Build a Snope
Have students create their own Snopes-style article, taking a story and either debunking it with facts or simply correcting parts where they can find sources for other viewpoints. 

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Increasingly students are turning to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms when it comes time to research school topics. 

A recent survey conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of McGraw Hill finds that 78%, or roughly 3 in 4 students, turn to social media when studying to find supplementary content for their classes. It also shows that 19% of students spend six or more hours per week searching for study content and help with classes on social media.

Other research shows that kids and teens spend an average of 91 minutes watching TikTok videos per day. 

While most educators are wary of their students using social media as an information source there are ways that they can help students navigate the various platforms and disinformation. 

Social Media As a Source

Dr. Trey Guinn, chair of communication at the University of the Incarnate Word in Texas, understands the impulse students have to search sites such as TikTok and YouTube for information.  “When I'm talking to my friends, and they say they completed a house project, I often say, ‘How did you know how to do that?' and they're like, ‘Oh, I watched it on YouTube,’” Guinn says. 

Students go to social media to learn in the same manner but what they find there isn't always helpful. “For my students who do turn to social media or YouTube, I question if the content they're getting is quality and actually helping. And in most cases, when they show me what they found it's quite disturbing," Guinn says.  

That’s why Guinn likes to provide his students with high-quality resources that extend beyond the textbook and capitalize on the technology that makes social media so popular. “I have a lot of students who are so intimidated by a big textbook that they wouldn't open it for all the money in the world,” he says. For example, he recommends tools such as Sharpen, a study app from education publishing company McGraw Hill that is designed to mirror the look, feel, and ease of use social media sites provide. It is also vetted to ensure credibility of its sources.

Media and News Literacy  

Regardless of their own feelings about it, social media is something educators need to contend with and can help their students navigate. “Kids are on social media, and it's an undeniable force in our society that can and does have some valuable information and access to experts,” says Christine Elgersma, senior editor for learning apps and websites at Common Sense Education. On the flip side, she says social media is hard to contain and control because the privacy issues can be so extensive. 

Elgersma advises teachers to consult Common Sense Education’s guide to social media use for educators. 

One good approach in general is for educators is to ground class exploration of social media in source evaluation. “It’s a great place to practice media literacy and news literacy because those are the sources that students are encountering in their daily lives," she says.  

Providing access to fact-checking sites and continuing to teach digital citizenship should also be part of any approach involving the use of social media as a research source.

Career Training and Connection With Students 

Whatever misgivings about social media educators may have, students are on these platforms and more frequently consuming history, chemistry, English, and other lessons through these. 

Amanda Granger, director of community engagement at WNET New York Public Media, says recognizing this reality is part of the reason she and her colleagues are working to develop a series of social media videos designed to teach K-12 students about different career opportunities. 

“In public media, we see that we are really able to effectively reach young children and older audiences, but it's incredibly challenging for us to reach youth on broadcast,” she says. “So we've been doing a lot of thinking about how we reach them directly with digital. How do we reach young people directly with content that is accurate, entertaining, informative, and safe for them to consume, since they're going to be on these platforms anyway?” 

Since students spend so much time on TikTok each day Granger says, “Let's meet them there with this content and get them interested and aware of all the different careers that exist.” 

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Checkology is a platform created by the News Literacy Project as a way to educate young people about how to use news media.

This is specifically tailored to education with a focus on teaching students to think about how they are consuming news and media online.

The idea is to use real-world news and apply a system of checks so that students can learn to better evaluate stories and sources, rather than blindly believing everything they see, read, and hear online.

A selection of modules are available to allow teachers to work with the class, or for students to work individually. So could this be a useful tool for you education institution?

What is Checkology?

Checkology is an all-too-rare tool that aims to teach students how to evaluate the ever-increasing mass of media that is being directed at them on a daily basis. It helps empower students to better recognize truth.

By using real-world news and a system of checks, carried out as part of learning modules, students are taught to do this for themselves. 

There are four key areas covered: knowing what to believe as true, navigating the media world, filtering news and other media, and exercising civil freedoms.

The idea is to not only have students distinguish fake news from real stories but to actually be able to evaluate the credibility of a story's source -- so they can decide for themselves what to believe.

It all sounds a bit like training everyone to be a journalist, and to some extent that is what this is doing. However, these abilities can be applied beyond journalism and writing classes as a valuable life skill for all. With journalists from The New York Times, Washington Post, and Buzzfeed all working as panelists on the website, this is a powerful and up-to-date system that applies even with the pace of media changing as it is.

How does Checkology work?

Checkology uses modules to teach students how to evaluate real-world news. Pick from a list of module options in which you will then be told how long the module is, the difficulty level, and the lesson host -- all at a glance. 

Then scroll down for more in-depth details on what the module consists of. Select Next to begin and you'll be taken into the video lesson.

The video is divided into sections with video guidance, written sections, example media, and questions -- all controlled by tapping the Next icon.

In one example there is a string of social media post results you can follow. This is then punctuated with a question in which there is an open answer box to type in a response. This way of working through the module helps students work individually, or as a class to progress.

While the basic modules teach through fictitious situations, the system can also be used for actual news, with a Check Tool, to apply these techniques in the real world.

What are the best Checkology features?

Checkology features some great modules that are free to access and use, which will teach students of all abilities how to better manage media. A lot of the focus is on getting to the source and using that to better understand truth. This doesn't take lateral reading, going beyond the source, into account perhaps as much as it could in some instances.

The Check Tool is a very helpful feature that lets students work independently through a news or media source so they can better navigate lies, embellishment, and truth with a level of confidence that this support offers.

The modules are designed so teachers can lead the class through each one as a group or individuals can work on their own. This flexibility is helpful in allowing everyone to go at their individual pace. The evaluation tool allows teachers to see student submissions and can even be integrated with the current LMS in use.

Professional development opportunities are also available for teachers, curated by Checkology and the News Literacy Project, as well as extra teaching materials and transcripts as needed.

How much does Checkology cost?

Checkology offers its modules for free that can be used by anybody, right away without the need to sign up, pay, or give personal details of any kind.

The whole system is supported entirely by philanthropic donations. Consequently, you will not be asked to pay for anything while using the system. It also means there are no ads or tracking of your details.

Checkology best tips and tricks

Evaluate live
Apply the skills learned in a live news situation as it develops, working as a class to evaluate what to believe as truth based on sources that you assess together.

Bring your own
Have students bring examples or stories -- including a social media hot topic -- so you can follow the thread as a class and work out the truth.

Break out
Take time to stop during the modules to hear from the class about examples of their experiences that are similar -- helping cement the ideas into their understanding.

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Fake news is nothing new. Examples of propaganda, sensationalism, and disinformation are known from as early as the 13th century B.C. But in the age of the internet, fake news spreads in a flash and its influence is unparalleled.

An informed citizenry is essential to a functioning democracy. Use these free fact-checking sites to help your students learn how to distinguish reliable information from false information and think critically about what they read online or in print.

Best Free Fact-Checking Sites for Students and Teachers

DebunkBot
Want to know more about a conspiracy theory that might—or might not—be true? An AI-driven experimental chatbot from MIT, DebunkBot is a powerful tool that yields extensive, footnoted feedback when prompted. Users simply enter a conspiracy theory, claim, or rumor and tell DebunkBot how sure they are. DebunkBot not only answers claims in detail, but also invites the questioner to engage in a constructive dialogue with it.

Reuters Fact Check
Many people get all or most of their news via social media. The problem with that, of course, is that it’s often of dubious accuracy, and includes no information that allows the user to independently verify. From the well-respected news agency Reuters, this simple fact-check scroll pulls videos and images from social media and corrects the narrative. Free for an unspecified limited number of articles, then users will be prompted to subscribe at $1/week or $45 annually. I was able to access more than a dozen articles without triggering the paywall.

Associated Press (AP) Fact Check
A fully free fact-checking service from the oldest American news agency, the esteemed Associated Press. AP Fact Check features fewer stories than Reuters does, but it offers a more in-depth view of the issues. Comments at the end of each article let you know what your fellow readers are thinking.

CTRL-F
Much more than just a fact-checking site, CTRL-F provides a robust digital media literacy curriculum, focussing on online search skills, verification skills and AI literacy. Included are interactive lessons, videos and downloadable PDF files, all conveniently sharable via Google Drive. This fully free resource from the Canadian non-profit CIVIX is open to users from all countries, who must register for a free account before accessing materials.

Quote Investigator
Did they really say it? Not the usual quotation site, Quote Investigator examines sayings attributed to a wide variety of famous persons, from Mark Twain to Maya Angelou. Go beyond internet memes to discover the truth.

Checkology
An impressively comprehensive approach to fact checking, Checkology is really a media literacy curriculum. Sign up for a free educator account and start browsing the standards-aligned lessons on misinformation, conspiratorial thinking, interpreting data, and more. The Check Center helps students evaluate an image, screenshot, or URL with questions to guide their inquiry.

Open Secrets
Open Secrets isn’t the usual fact-checking site. Rather, it’s dedicated to tracking, documenting, and revealing the sources of money in American politics and the effect on elections and policy. The site’s research tools include national and local donor lookup as well as selected datasets about campaigns and donors. Great for PBL and advanced students.

Lead Stories
In contrast to the simple, sober web design employed by most fact-checking sites, Lead Stories uses colorful banners, sensational headlines, and strategic ALL CAPS to draw the user into their articles. Web design notwithstanding, Lead Stories specializes in debunking social media rumor mongering and AI-generated fake videos and images.

Inoculation Science
From the University of Cambridge, Inoculation Science provides videos and interactive games to illuminate the methods used to propagate false information via social media—and why we humans are vulnerable to such tricks. Lesson idea: Have your students watch the videos, then find posts from their own social media feeds to serve as examples for the given manipulations.

AllSides
Allsides has a unique approach to fact checking, looking at each trending topic from the perspective of left, right, and center media. Often, the key facts are not in dispute; rather, it’s the subtle (or obvious) bias applied to the same set of facts that’s highlighted by AllSides. A good tool to help kids start to understand about media bias and how one’s viewpoint affects the interpretation of events.

Politifact
The go-to site for verifying political claims, Politifact covers a wide range of issues, people, and promises, and includes 14 state-specific editions. Brief summaries titled “If Your Time is Short” offer immediate confirmation of truth or falsehood, while the list of sources used to fact check any given assertion allow for a deeper dive into the story. Be sure to check out the Truth-O-Meter, which rates claims on a sliding scale from “true” to “pants on fire.” Factual and enjoyable!

FactCheck.org
From the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Factcheck.org is one of the oldest and most respected fact-checking sites. Click on FactCheck posts to read the latest news fact-checked. Or select a topic, such as Donald Trump, President Biden, or coronavirus to explore stories that may or may not be 100% true. Each article includes a quick summary, full report, and references.

Snopes
Snopes is flat-out fun, featuring wacky articles about the 8-foot tall woman, cannibalism, and Halloween candy. But underneath the sometimes-amusing subject matter are real fact checkers who investigate the claims, uncover evidence, and present conclusions. And it’s not only outlandish stories, but also any news-worthy topic, including politics, culture and global events. Snopes calls itself the oldest and largest fact-checking site online. Is it true? I haven’t fact-checked that claim, but I know your students will love Snopes.

BBC Verify
The highly respected British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) takes a wide-ranging look at trends, rumors, global events, and disputed or controversial news stories. Students can dive into the careful analysis and draw their own conclusions.

A school principal may not have a huge influence on the grades of students at that school, suggests a new and potentially seismic preprint study published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. 

The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, challenges the efficacy of traditional measurements of principal impact on student success and suggests that the role a principal plays in such success is much smaller than generally believed. However, Brendan Bartanen, the study’s lead author, stresses that it does not indicate principals don’t matter. 

“They are largely in charge of what's going on inside schools, and they definitely matter,” says Bartanen, a professor of Education Policy at the University of Virginia. “The takeaway from this study is that they matter, but perhaps in ways that you're not going to easily observe through what happens in terms of student outcomes.” 

What The Study Found  

Traditionally, a principal’s impact on student academic success is evaluated using value-added or growth measures. For these calculations, a prediction for each student’s future success is made based on their past performance and economic background, such as whether or not they qualify for a reduced-price lunch. Teachers and principals are then evaluated on how much better or worse the average student does versus this prediction. 

To see if measuring the “value-added” at a school under a principal was an effective metric, Bartanen and his co-authors looked at data from Tennessee, New York City, and Oregon. All schools see variations in student success, but if that variation was attributable to principals the expectation would be that the schools that had the same principal for extended periods of time would see less variability. In addition, schools that switched principals should see more variability. However, the researchers did not find either to be the case. 

“Even among principals who have been in the school for a long time, we still see lots of ebbs and flows in school performance,” Bartanen says. “Test scores are going up, and they're going down. They follow this sort of back-and-forth type pattern. And it doesn't seem like that pattern is driven by whether or not the school changed principals or anything like that, it seems to operate independently of who's leading the school.”

The Study’s Implications  

This study’s findings need to be further analyzed by other researchers, but its potential implications are significant. 

Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of Education & Economics at Brown University, called the paper a “must read” in a Tweet. “Once in a long while a paper comes along and (credibly) upends an entire literature,” he wrote. “This is one of those papers, calling into question both the empirics & consensus about research on principal effectiveness.” 

Bartanen hopes the study will help shift the metrics used to gauge principal effectiveness from grades to the principals’ impact on hiring policies, budgeting, and the school’s overall feel. He’d like to see rubrics that cover the main tasks for which principals are responsible. “Are they establishing a positive climate?” he asks. “Are they managing the resources effectively? Are they budgeting well? Are they engaging in what we would say are strong instructional leadership behaviors – so are they providing teachers with coaching?” 

In the meantime, Bartanen does not want his research misinterpreted as disparaging the work principals do. “Principals are really important,” he says. 

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Silver bullet solutions are not unique to education. Fad diets, get-risk-fast investment schemes, and untested COVID cures are testaments to the widespread appeal of a silver bullet solution. But silver bullets, and the almost-magic quick fixes promised, can be particularly damaging in education where funds and resources are limited, and where these can distract from more modest interventions that provide small but important gains. 

Educators have spoken out against silver bullet-type interventions and the quick fixes these promise since at least the 1980s, so why do these approaches continue to have such appeal? We asked some leading researchers. 

Silver Bullet Solutions Offer Easy Answers to Complicated Problems  

“The alternative to there being silver bullets is this idea that school communities are unique, they have unique needs, and that if you want to improve them, it's a very bespoke local process,” says Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. 

Viewed from this localized perspective, fixing problems in education becomes a more daunting task. “Then there are 130,000 schools and 13,000 school districts that you have to help try to get better,” Reich says. “I totally understand why people hope, ‘Oh, but aren't there some things we could do that could help everyone?’ It just usually doesn't unfold that way.” 

Silver Bullets Appeal to Us Cognitively  

One or two simple interventions are often easier for most people to digest than more complex strategies. “The architecture of human cognition is such that we have a hard time handling more than a handful of concepts in our head at a time,” says Virginia Clinton-Lisell, a professor in educational psychology at the University of North Dakota.

Given this, many people are unconsciously drawn to silver bullet solutions to complex problems. However, the impulse to try silver bullets isn’t always a bad thing, says Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of Education & Economics at Brown University

“It's understandable that people are looking for big solutions because we have big problems in education in the United States,” he says. 

We Misunderstand Data  

A silver bullet-type intervention can seem better than it is because it relies on the results of one study that often can’t be applied universally. Sometimes smaller studies show lots of promise but are not effective when implemented on a larger scale. 

A classic example of this is found in Benjamin S. Bloom’s famous 2 sigma problem. For his study, Bloom observed tremendous positive impacts from students who engaged in intensive one-on-one tutoring instead of taking a class, but as is often the case, there was no way to implement this type of program on a larger scale. 

“That was from a study of tutoring done with a very small group of students focused on a very narrow content area,” Kraft says. “It's just not something that is realistic to replicate at scale, in our very diverse and decentralized education system.”

Research Is Often Focused on One Intervention 

The complex nature of research often requires researchers to zero in on their particular area of research to the exclusion of other areas. 

“Experts narrow in on one specific component,” Clinton-Lisell says. “So their suggestions are probably going to be single-focused. And in order to advance in their careers and get funding for the research, they have to come up with a convincing narrative as to why their particular area of expertise is better.” 

Because of this, some have suggested re-working the funding structure for researchers. Clinton-Lisell believes it might help if researchers didn't have to fight one another so much to win funding. 

Even Effective Educational Interventions Have Limits

Even good research-backed interventions that really help students are rarely, if ever, true silver bullets, because there’s a limit to the impact any one intervention can have. 

“If you're really good at [something], oftentimes getting better involves not doing more of that thing, but doing more of something else,” Reich says. “I spent some time in Singapore as they were really coming to be recognized for their impressive growth in the education system, which they accomplished due to a lot of centralization and coordination. But they reached the limit of what they could achieve through centralization and coordination, and they needed more autonomy and innovation and independence.” 

Big Ideas Have a Place But Shouldn’t Distract From Everyday Efforts 

Kraft says education needs moonshots and silver bullets, but at the same time school leaders should be realistic about the impact of any one innovation. 

“There's an incredible need to change the status quo, but that work is often very difficult and only produces meaningful change with sustained effort over time, and it often is incremental change,” Kraft says. “Even though we need massive change, that doesn't mean that we should be dismissive of incremental change, because sometimes if we prematurely abandon efforts that are making a difference, we end up chasing the next big fad in education rather than just doing something well.” 

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Even in the age of streaming video and interactive learning apps, reading matters. 

That’s one of the key takeaways in a new study that found a small, but significant, association between reading comprehension and college grades. For the study, researchers looked at 26 previous studies and a total of 25,090 students and found that differences in reading comprehension could explain 8.4 percent of the variation seen in college grades. 

“That's a substantial explanation of college student grades,” says Virginia Clinton-Lisell, the lead author of the study and a professor in educational psychology at the University of North Dakota who specializes in language and reading comprehension. “It's about the same magnitude as high school GPA, and high school GPA is historically regarded as the best predictor of college GPA.”

The study was recently published in the Journal of College Reading and Learning and was funded through a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. 

Reading Still Matters 

Clinton-Lisell began studying the impact of reading comprehension on college grades after encountering the perception from some educators that reading comprehension is less important in college than it once was. “Having students actively demonstrating their knowledge and engaging with the material in a way that's visible is more emphasized now in best practices in college instruction,” Clinton-Lisell says. In addition, audio and visual options for learning are more abundant than ever, and there are anecdotal reports of college professors assigning shorter readings.

Given these trends, Clinton-Lisell and her team set out to discover whether reading comprehension has an impact on college success. Their research indicates the answer is a resounding yes.

“Reading comprehension matters,” Clinton-Lisell says. “It predicts college achievement, it's definitely something we should care about as far as a school. It’s a skill college students need.” 

In addition, if technological advancements or shifts in pedagogy had indeed diminished the importance of reading comprehension, researchers would expect to observe the impact of reading comprehension on college grades decrease over time. However, Clinton-Lisell and her colleagues did not see that in their research. 

Teaching Reading Comprehension 

In K-12, particularly in the earlier grades, there are many effective approaches for developing reading comprehension. “Nowadays, we have a very good idea of how to teach it,” Clinton-Lisell says. “First, just make sure kids have access to books, and that they get to read a lot, that they get to practice.” 

In addition, there are well-established strategies educators can use to support young readers. These include peer-assisted learning and inferential skill exercises.  

As students age, however, the education system is less focused on reading comprehension, Clinton-Lisell says. “We're getting better, but where we need improvement is adolescent literacy, and working with kids who struggle with reading who are in middle and high school.” 

In college, there is little attention paid to reading comprehension and limited data on what interventions work. “We do have lots of college students coming in who struggle with reading, and unfortunately, we’ve found out that doing developmental English courses just don't seem very effective,” Clinton-Lisell says. “They prolong time to graduation, and the longer it takes to graduate, the less likely you are to graduate.” 

Clinton-Lisell would like to see reading comprehension get similar attention to writing because of how closely linked those skills are. “The idea of writing across the curriculum and encouraging professors across the disciplines to have writing assignments and support writing and how to teach writing effectively has been pretty well communicated,” Clinton-Lisell says. “Perhaps a better movement would be reading across the curriculum, and incentives or initiatives to really help professors in various disciplines incorporate ways to scaffold their students’ reading comprehension.” 

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New research looking at data from New York City schools has found that Black, Latino, and Asian-American students are less likely to be suspended from school if they take classes with more teachers who share their racial or ethnic background. 

The research was led by Matthew Shirrell, professor of Educational Leadership and Administration at George Washington University, and has significant implications for teacher diversity recruitment efforts as well as inclusive teaching practices for educators of any ethnic or racial background.  

Key Findings  

Previous research found that in North Carolina, Black students were less likely to suffer suspensions when they had Black teachers. Shirrell and his co-authors, Travis Bristol and Tolani Britton both of the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to see if similar trends held true in a large urban school district such as New York, and whether the same association could be seen with Latino and Asian-American students. 

“There was really no prior work that had looked at this for Latino students or Asian students,” Shirrell says. 

Shirrell and his team looked at ten years of data, from 2007 to 2017, on every student and teacher in grades 4-8 in New York City. They found that the decrease in suspension likelihood caused by having teachers of the same race or ethnicity as students was nearly the same for Asian, Black, and Latino students at about 3 percent.

The study also estimated that if New York City schools upped the proportion of Latino teachers for Latino students from 20 percent to 50 percent, this would likely result in 1,500 fewer suspensions over ten years. 

While Shirrell’s study did not look at the cause of this association there are several theories. One possibility is that a teacher who looks like their students can serve as a positive role model for those students, resulting in fewer instances of students acting up in class. However, teacher bias may be more likely. The North Carolina research that Shirrell’s study built on found that Black students were more likely to get suspended for minor infractions, such as talking back in class, when they were taught by white teachers. 

Key Takeaways  

The study supports longstanding efforts in education to recruit more diverse teachers, Shirrell says. However, it also highlights a need to better understand how teachers, regardless of their own race, can be more supportive of students of various backgrounds and mindful of their own biases.

“We don't want to have the solution be that Black students can only be taught by Black teachers and Latino students can only be taught by Latino teachers,” he says. “We need to learn more about what are the practices, the orientations, the mechanisms within classrooms that are leading to these differences.” 

A lot of discretion is available at the teacher level about which behavior is reported and which is not, Shirrell says. “I think that there is a need for us to understand more about how teachers exercise that discretion in ways that might lead to these kinds of differences,” he says. “We should really think about induction and professional learning for all teachers. Because no matter what our teacher diversity efforts are, for the foreseeable future in places like New York, we're going to have a teacher workforce that's predominantly white. And so we need to think about how we help teachers reflect and learn discipline practices that can help reduce these kinds of disparities.” 

• How Can Teachers Reduce Bias?
• How to Develop a Diverse School IT Staff

A group of leading virtual and extended reality (XR) educators have authored a report on the metaverse – a network of interconnected 3D virtual worlds that may be the next evolution of social communication and collaboration – and its potential in education. 

“After considering many conversations we have had with both educators and technology creators, we felt there was a real need to provide an introductory guide about XR, based on our expertise and grounded in the research to date on learning and immersive technology,” says Eileen McGivney, a PhD candidate and researcher at Harvard University, who adds that the report’s research team originally considered conducting a systematic review of research into extended reality or conducting new research looking at the technology in learning. 

Ultimately, she says, “We wanted to help the education community understand the technology, and the technology community to understand education.” 

Their evidence-based report, “An Introduction to Learning In the Metaverse,” was published by Meridian Treehouse. McGivney and other co-authors shared some highlights from the report. 

1. The Metaverse Doesn’t Actually Exist Yet  

“When talking about the metaverse, we mean a whole ecosystem of interconnected virtual spaces distributed across various technologies,” says Géraldine Fauville, an assistant professor of Education Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. 

However, these interconnected virtual spaces or worlds are still in development. 

“This ideal of the metaverse doesn’t yet exist but the main technologies creating the foundation for its future do,” says Wesley Della Volla, founder of Meridian Treehouse. 

Despite the media coverage the concept has received, the metaverse still requires improvements in technology to become a reality, says Daniel Pimental, assistant professor of Immersive Media Psychology at the University of Oregon. “For example, advancements in artificial intelligence – computer vision – blockchain technology, and increased bandwidth with 5G connectivity, will form the foundation for the scalable, immersive learning ecosystem we envision,” he says. 

2. The Metaverse May Offer Great Potential for Educators 

In the future, if used correctly, the metaverse may have the potential to open new learning experiences to users. “For too long, learning has been thought of as transmitting information devoid of context, but when designed well, the metaverse can provide rich contexts for people to learn more than just content knowledge,” McGivney says. 

Fauville is interested in the ways in which students' and teachers’ increasingly complex avatars in the metaverse will impact education. “The virtual bodies we inhabit have profound short- and long-term effects on how we think, feel, and behave,” she says. “Giving learners autonomy over their self-presentation will undoubtedly influence their learning experience, from driving engagement to increasing the self-relevance of the subject matter.” 

3. The Metaverse Will Not Be A Silver Bullet  

The authors of this report agree there is enormous educational potential for metaverse, however, educators should temper expectations. “Let’s make sure we do not overestimate the potential of the metaverse for education,” Fauville says. 

The metaverse is not a silver bullet, Volla says. “It is part of the future of learning but cannot exist in a vacuum. Learning doesn’t stop once you take off the headset or turn off the AR filter.” 

The key will be finding creative ways to use the metaverse to supplement traditional learning experiences. “I would caution educators from trying to replicate classroom structures within XR, and rather take their time to play and explore the technology to consider new learning opportunities that they can’t usually provide,” McGivney says. “This includes giving students lots of agency and allowing them to create their own metaverse technologies and experiences.” 

4. The Metaverse Needs to Be Inclusive and Equitable

“The hardware that is currently used to access metaverse experiences, like VR headsets, are not affordable and are difficult to wear for many people from groups who are underrepresented in the technology industry,” McGivney says. “Many of these technologies are also designed in a commercial environment that prioritizes profit over things like data privacy and effective educational design. Further, there are issues we point to in the report about XR experiences themselves, which are not designed in a way that is beneficial or accessible for all populations.” 

The report points out, for example, that someone with limited mobility in their hands might struggle to use controllers. Others might have difficulty if they wear glasses, and most current headsets can’t be worn over head coverings and many hair styles. 

“The most pressing question is how to make use of the metaverse in learning in a judicious, inclusive, and effective way,” Fauville says. “Also when and how should learning activities in the metaverse be embedded into existing learning practices.” 

5. The Blueprint for Metaverse Education is Still Being Designed  

It’s important to remember that we are at the genesis of the metaverse in education and that many stakeholders should be involved in the evolution of its use going forward. 

“Taking a rigorous, evidence-based approach to building a blueprint for the future of learning is critical to success,” says Erika Woolsey, PhD, a visiting scholar at Stanford University. “We need as many people as possible collaborating on open-access research to answer questions ranging from big picture ones like, ‘Is utilizing new technology even beneficial to learning?’ to more tactical ones like, ‘What forms of interactivity influence a learner’s sense of agency?’”

Woolsey adds: “Right now we have a lot more questions than answers, and we think that’s the best place to start.” 

• VR in Education: Potential and Barriers for Effective Use
• What Is Virtual Reality?

There are six secrets that Gallup and Purdue University identify that, if offered to students in combination, boost their confidence in school and yield greater happiness and success throughout their adult lives. “It is a simple formula, but once it is in action, students' engagement, confidence, and outlook for the future all improve,” says Jason Alleman, principal at Laguna Beach High School (LBHS) in California.

LBHS found that the Big Six Combination for college undergraduates resonates with their high school students as well. High school students already can receive an undergraduate-level academic program through Advanced Placement, and now they can experience the best factors of an undergraduate social and emotional support experience as well.

The Big Six are divided into two categories:

Support

1. A teacher who inspires 
2. A teacher who cares
3. A mentor

Experiential 

1. Works on a project for a semester or more 
2. Has an experience that allows direct application of learning 
3. Participates in extracurricular activities 

Of the adults who reported that they engaged in none of these opportunities in school, only 5% indicated that they were prepared well for success and happiness in their jobs and lives.  But in the group of adults who said they engaged in all six opportunities while in school, 82% reported that they were well-prepared to achieve happiness and success.

The challenge is how can districts offer these opportunities in a cohesive way. LBHS chose to design a class called Authentic Exploratory Research (AER), inspired by Palo Alto USD's Advanced Authentic Research project. 

AER allows students to choose a year-long area of study in which they are interested. Here are three recent student examples:

-  Izzy S. completed a project about youth fashion branding and marketing. She worked with a local fashion designer and business owner to research how effectively various boutique fashion brands used social media to market to teenagers. According to Izzy, “AER is not another class. When you do it, it doesn’t feel like homework because it is something you’re actually interested in.” 

-  Nathan S. chose a project about the achievement gaps between different socio-economic school districts. Throughout the year, his research and investigation led him deeper and deeper into the nuances of school funding and resource allocation, to the point that the end product far exceeded his expectations. When reflecting upon AER, Nathan says: “I genuinely did not think that I could create a quality piece of literature without me even going to college yet. So looking back, it was one of my greatest accomplishments during my time at LBHS.” 

-  Soren T. compared and contrasted entrepreneurship between Chinese and American entrepreneurs for his AER project. Through his mentor, Soren was able to survey small business owners in China and the U.S. to examine the business culture in both countries. According to Soren, his AER experience was “not just a research project; it’s not just Googling stuff; it was a personal, hands-on, learning growth experience. It is such an empowering project that it gives you a sense of accomplishment and great appreciation for all the work you did.” 

 In addition to the Big Six (Ingredients of Success) AER offers: 

• A real-world application 
• Scientific process design
• Publication 

Potential Timeframe of an AER class

The workflow of the year is designed to work with students' schedules. Each meets with the instructor weekly to discuss progress and remove roadblocks to success. Students are expected to spend 60 hours per semester on coursework, roughly half of which is on the project itself while the other half is on instruction, reflection, organization, and other weekly tasks.  

To celebrate the success and provide an opportunity for an authentic audience, a symposium is offered to the community. During the symposium, staff, mentors, and community members listen to the students describe their experiences and findings. 

Superintendent Jason Viloria has witnessed the students light up during their presentations. “This is not project-based learning, this is reality-based learning,” he says. “The real-life twists and turns of these challenging learning adventures fuel the student's mastery and their research.” 

Laguna Beach has adopted a very powerful definition of authentic learning, which is changing the hearts and minds of students. Our hearts are about 18 inches from our brains on a physical level, and AER is closing that gap between our passions/interests (our hearts) and our academic/thinking (our minds).

Tips & Advice for School Districts Looking to Implement AER 

• Find an instructor who is passionate about this to lead it 
• Empower the instructor to build relationships with each individual student 
• Mentors can be found through parent surveys (work with PTA and community partners) 
• If you can’t find a mentor locally, try Nepris which offers connection to 58,000 industry professionals 
• You can still have great authentic learning experience by adopting some of these components 
• Help students design projects that aren’t excessively dependent on the mentors 
• Mentors should help to point out student blind spots as well as provide guidance, resources, and expertise 
• Partner with other existing school programs, such as Model UN, Student Leadership, or CTE programs 
• AER can be the capstone of a pathway 

For more information, visit LBUSD.org/AER

Growth mindset works best under specific circumstances, says David S. Yeager, associate professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Yeager was the lead author of a 2019 study that examines the impact of growth mindset training in 12,000 9th graders. While previous research around growth mindset had been mixed and there remain questions around the concept, this study found that growth mindset helps students who are struggling with learning and attend a school that supports a growth mindset. 

Incorporating certain growth mindset best practices into your classroom can help students, says Yeager. 

1. Don’t Actually Tell Kids About Growth Mindset

“It turns out, kids don't like being told what to believe,” Yeager says. “In our experiments, we never say, ‘Here's growth mindset, and you should adopt it. Here's fixed mindset and it's bad.’ We instead just say, ‘It is simply true that the brain grows and develops like a muscle.’ And when you know that, it frees you up to worry about or think about the work rather than feeling dumb.” 

2. Make Sure Your Class Policies Support Growth Mindset 

Since Yeager’s study found that growth mindset interventions were most effective in schools that had an environment that was supportive of the approach, it’s important to foster it in your class or school. “Audit your grading policies,” Yeager advises. “Look for times where they're inconsistent with a belief in growth and learning from mistakes and so on.” 

Often teachers will say they believe in growth mindset but their class policies don’t support it. “I'm going to tell my students mistakes are your friend,” Yeager says many teachers will say just before adding, “But my syllabus only gives you one chance to learn something. I'm never going to retest you on a concept later. It's impossible to revise your test if you got a low score, and all of the problems I'm going to give you are yes-no memorization questions where you don't actually need to think deeply and interrogate your mistakes.” 

In a growth mindset classroom, students need opportunities and space for practice and trying to learn from mistakes.

3. Use Research-Tested Growth Mindset Exercises 

If you decide to introduce your students to the concept of growth mindset, Yeager says you should use a research-tested intervention. “There are lots of available ones that have been in our randomized experiments, where we vouch for them,” Yeager says. “And there are an infinite number on Tumblr that we don't vouch for. Don't Google ‘growth mindset,’ and then look on Google images and find a cat poster that has a cat reaching for a cookie that says growth mindset.” 

Examples of evidence-based growth mindset programs, including the module used by students who participated in Yeager’s Nature study, can be found here. 

4. Be Wary of Growth Mindset Overpromises  

An outspoken proponent of growth mindset, Yeager is also mindful of its limitations. He knows it won’t work for all students in all instances and stresses that it’s not a silver bullet. 

“I have total sympathy for teachers, and for how hard their jobs are, and how easy it is to be skeptical of ideas because fads come and go in education,” he says. “The reason why I've been obsessed with testing things rigorously is because as a former teacher, I saw the tidal wave of hype coming. I want teachers to benefit from all the research we did to prevent the crashing wave of a hype cycle. I really want to avoid that scenario where everyone gives up on a promising idea because they reject a caricature of it.” 

• Does Growth Mindset Work?
• PISA Report: A Growth Mindset Can Lead to Better Student Outcomes
  

You would have to be paying no attention to education news to miss the shuffle of school superintendents across the U.S. For instance, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Alberto Carhvahlo, is now the superintendent of Los Angeles Unified. Houston Independent School District was led by an interim superintendent for three years until the board unanimously voted in Millard House II into the position, pulling him from Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools in Tennessee. Fairfax County recently nabbed Michelle Reid, the 2021 AASA National Superintendent of the Year, yielding questions from NAACP about the qualifications of the candidate to lead a significantly larger district than her Northshore School District that serves 22,000 predominately white students. 

These superintendents moved far distances from their previous districts to take on new leadership challenges, yet 50% of superintendents in the U.S. are unsure about how long they plan to even remain a superintendent. 

A recent study of the nation’s 500 largest school districts reveals that 37% of experienced leadership turned over during the pandemic. In a time when equity and diversity is the focus, 70% of the newly appointed superintendents are men and 39 of these were replacing female superintendents. Of the 13,728 superintendents in the U.S., only 1,984 are women. That number is even more astonishing when considering women represent 72% of all K-12 educators. 

Here is some even more incredible research regarding the top education position: 

• 28.5% of all school superintendents are women, while 71.5% are men 
• The average age of an employed superintendent is 46 years old 
• The most common ethnicity of superintendents is White (68.6%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (14.0%), and Black or African American (10.2%) 
• The majority of superintendents are located in New York, N.Y., and San Bernardino, CA 
• Superintendents are paid an average annual salary of $115,019 
• Superintendents’ average starting salary is $79,000 
• In 2021, women earned 93% of what men earned 
• The top 10% of highest-paid superintendents earn as much as $167,000 
• 15% of all superintendents identify as LGBTQ 

Leading during a crisis is one of the most challenging tasks a leader can take on and the crisis of health and welfare of children during a pandemic, mixed with the varying ways that states managed accountability during this time, makes it doubly stressful. 

Another major stressor for superintendents has been finding classroom educators, with at least 60% reporting teacher and substitute shortages. (See Tech & Learning’s April Playbook for Teachers). 

All this stress is amplified even further when there is a divided school board. The politics that have played out in school board chambers in recent years have been dramatic and represent a lapse in the belief of public education. As a result, school board elections in near months are polarizing in almost every state, with governors in South Carolina and Tennessee passing education funding legislation focused on weighted formulas for students, which may or may not be in a district’s favor. 

To help solve the numerous superintendent shifts we’re seeing in education, we must begin with the school boards and city councils that are responsible for overseeing the governance of school districts.  

The fundamental role of a school board is to select a highly qualified superintendent who can meet the needs of the community and its schools. Finding that person today may feel like finding a needle in the haystack, but great superintendents do exist and they are worth every penny. Superintendents should be the last person standing in a school district and that type of leader is the one school boards should seek. 

If a school board is unsure about how to go about finding a great superintendent, here are some places to start:

• American Association of School Administrators 
• Characteristics of Effective Superintendents - National School Public Relations Association 
• Effective Superintendents, Effective Boards - Wallace Foundation 

School board chairs should also reach out to their state school board association for assistance with searches. And, if you want to be inspired to hire a woman for the role, check out the Tech & Learning’s Honor Role podcast, hosted by two former assistant superintendents, Dr. Kecia Ray and Dr. Frances Gipson. 

Harry Fletcher-Wood first heard the concept of a growth mindset at a conference in New Orleans a little more than a decade ago. 

Like many other educators, he was intrigued by the idea that if students adopted a growth mindset – the belief that academic skills such as math were not talent-based – they could increase their academic performance over students with a fixed mindset. 

“It sounds great,” says Fletcher-Wood, author of Habits of Success: Getting Every Student Learning. “I loved it. I was like, ‘This is an explanation for how your kids are struggling. And this is the thing that's going to solve it.’ And I was like, ‘Sign me up.’” 

However, since then, the research around growth mindset and Fletcher-Wood’s thinking on it have become more complicated. Fletcher-Wood, a former history teacher who is now head of school surveys for Teacher Tapp, a United Kingdom-based survey app, recently wrote on his blog, “I have no idea if growth mindset is real. I’ve read robust studies showing it has no effect – and robust studies showing it does.”

Growth Mindset Gains Traction–And Challenges  

In one key 2007 study, researchers found that students who were taught a growth mindset in a randomized control trial outperformed those who were not. This study helped bring the concept to the mainstream, and Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University and one of the study’s authors, became a bestseller.

However, over the years, researchers have begun to question some of the original findings in support of growth mindset. For instance, some of the early growth mindset studies were small – the 2007 paper was based in part on a study looking at just under 100 students – and the findings haven’t been replicated in later research.

Brooke N. Macnamara, associate professor of Cognitive Psychology at Case Western Reserve University, has conducted research with colleagues that challenges the efficacy of growth mindset. For a 2018 study, Macnamara and her co-authors conducted two meta-analyses looking at the connection between student mindset and mindset interventions and academic achievement. They found little impact. 

In addition, a 2020 study co-authored by Macnamara found little evidence for some of the core assumptions of growth mindset. For instance, growth-mindset models predict that a student with a growth mindset will be focused on learning. “We found a pretty weak relationship there,” Macnamara said. “One's mindset explained about 1 percent of the variance of how focused you are on learning.” 

Another tenet of mindset thinking is that students with a fixed mindset are focused on performance goals – looking smart – while those with a growth mindset seek out and embrace challenges. “We actually found no evidence for that,” Macnamara said. 

Finally, growth mindset students are thought to be more resilient following failure. “For that one, we found a weak relationship, just over 1 percent of the variance, but in the opposite direction as mindset would predict,” Macnamara said. “So if anything, people with a growth mindset did a little bit worse following failure feedback than people with a fixed mindset.” 

However, she stressed this association, though the strongest observed in the study, was still quite small and likely insignificant. 

Growth Mindset Strikes Back  

In 2019, a robust national study examining the impact of growth mindset training in 12,000 9th graders was published in Nature. For the study, researchers randomly assigned certain students to complete a 50-minute module during the school day that explained intelligence is not fixed and that you can improve by putting in more effort and trying different strategies. The study was rigorously designed. Teachers were “blinded,” so they didn’t know which students received the growth mindset training and which did not, and therefore did not treat them differently. The data was sent to third-party analysts who were unaware of the intervention being studied to eliminate potential bias. 

Ultimately, the study found that growth mindset training had an impact on specific children: those who were struggling in school but attended a school that supports a growth mindset. The growth mindset training didn’t play much of a role for students who were on track to graduate anyhow and/or who went to schools without supportive cultures. It worked for, “vulnerable kids in supportive places,” says David S. Yeager the lead author of the study, which had more than 20 co-authors including growth mindset pioneer Dweck. 

“The huge misunderstanding is when I say, ‘Okay, it works for these people in this context,’ what some people want to say is, ‘Oh, see you're admitting your thing only works for this tiny group and it's not important.’ And I'm like, ‘No, nothing works for everyone,’” says Yeager, an associate professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. “We took the most systematic possible approach, a national random sample, used super-advanced statistics, and unlike almost anything else in education, we discovered where it works and for whom.” 

Yeager says one of the clear takeaways from the debate around growth mindset is that nothing is a magic bullet in education. “Growth mindset is not the curriculum, it doesn't teach you physics. Physics class teaches you physics,” he says. “Growth mindset is like, ‘Here's the path through which you can become better at this.’ There is reason for hope and optimism, but hope and optimism is not physics knowledge and math knowledge.” 

He says that he and many other growth mindset proponents have always been wary of some of the loftier claims around the concept. “We have always said there's a hype cycle – like don't buy the hype, but do use this really powerful idea, and embed it in your culture as a complement to your most rigorous coursework. And when you do that, it actually does inspire students,” he says. 

Growth Mindset Takeaways  

One explanation for the mixed findings around growth mindset would be that the studies showing that it works is because of other factors that go beyond growth mindset. This is what Fletcher-Wood now believes. “My sense just from reading the growth mindset experiments is they do a load of things that we know work in and of themselves,” he says. For instance, the growth mindset training in Yeager’s 2019 study featured stories from “older students and admired adults” about growth mindset. “We know that presenting people with the right role models in the right way has a really big effect on their belief and their effort,” Fletcher-Wood says. “So I think if you chop the onion and you get down to the middle, there's probably nothing there that is growth mindset that's separate from everything else.” 

Yeager disagrees. “Are there mysteries about how growth mindset works? Absolutely, but it's not whether it changes growth mindset, that's reliable, it happens every time,” he says. 

However, teachers looking to incorporate a growth mindset lesson should use a research-tested method instead of just Googling growth mindset and finding an unvetted lesson plan, Yeager says. 

For his part, Fletcher-Wood would like to see a better understanding of exactly what is happening around growth mindset. “If we’re misattributing the causes of student success, I think that's problematic,” he says. 

In the meantime, he isn’t worried about encouraging the growth mindset basics in children. “Fundamentally, the message that we can all get smarter is a great message,” he says. “And it's one I very happily tell students I teach or tell my own kids.” 

• Busting The Myth of Learning Styles
• 5 Teaching Tips Using Brain Science

A research team at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab surveyed and interviewed more than 300 parents and legal guardians about their children’s virtual reality (VR) use between April and July 2020. 

The team led by Marijn Mado and Dr. Géraldine Fauville recently published their findings in Technology, Mind, and Behavior.  

Key takeaways include: 

• Children’s median VR usage increased from 20 minutes to 30 minutes per day since the start of the pandemic
• Parents saw potential for VR in education, particularly when VR experiences were enhanced by supporting materials before or after the lesson
• Many parents had difficulty finding educational VR resources for their children
• Some women surveyed in the study experienced motion sickness using VR and had more concerns about the safety of the technology
• Despite most VR headset companies suggesting 13 years as the age limit, many younger children used the technology.

As VR technology grows increasingly popular, educators looking to incorporate it into their classrooms should keep in mind its strengths and limitations. 

“VR can provide this inspiring spark, and it can start discussions in our classroom,” Mado says. “But I think in order to really properly learn, and to get a very nuanced kind of rational view of what's going on in a certain social context, it's important to scaffold VR with all sorts of educational materials.”

VR’s Potential for Education: Context is Key  

One mother interviewed for the study described how while in lockdown her daughter spent time exploring the Anne Frank House VR experience, which gave her an appreciation of just how small the space in which Anne Frank hid was and sparked other important conversations. 

However, many parents talked about how their children need contextualization of the VR experience. “The Key is a VR experience that is really premised on the refugee crisis, but it's also quite abstract,” Mado says. “One father told us his son went through The Key, but never ended up really making these connections with the refugee crisis and what that meant, even though his son had been learning about this topic in school and had been learning about it in other contexts.” 

Meanwhile, another family used The Key experience to more meaningfully engage in conversations about the refugee crisis. The difference, the researchers concluded, was all about context. 

“It's like any kind of learning material,” Fauville says. “You would not have students running an experiment in a lab without having them understand some principle, and understanding what are they going to do, why they are going to do it, how they are going to do it.” 

After a lab activity, there would be a debriefing session, which is a model educators should follow with VR learning experiences, Fauville says. 

VR Accessibility  

The parents surveyed for the study were found through the research team’s social networks. Because these are technology researchers, the participants they found tended to be tech-savvy VR enthusiasts and many worked for VR companies. Therefore, they were perhaps better able to guide their children in the use of the technology than an average parent from the general population might have been. However, even the parents surveyed had trouble finding educational VR experiences for their children. 

“We can imagine that this problem might be even bigger for someone who buys a VR headset because their kid is interested without having a special connection to that world,” Fauville says. 

To help parents find the educational resources that are available in VR, the team put together a list of the 169 VR applications included in the survey, which now serves as a resource for parents and educators. 

More troublingly, the study found that VR technology was gendered, which may hinder its usage among women and girls. Some of the women discussed experiencing cybersickness, a type of motion sickness associated with screen and VR use. “The women in our study who mentioned symptoms of visually induced motion sickness are no anomaly,” the paper noted. “As studies find that females are more likely than males to suffer from visual-induced motion sickness, such as cybersickness, when exposed to VR.” 

Previous research suggests this may be because the VR kits are designed for men and not women. Men often have larger interpupillary distance (distance between pupils) and most VR headsets cater to the interpupillary distance of men, which might increase the incidence of cybersickness in women, Mado says. In addition, the headsets can be uncomfortable with long hair. 

Beyond these physical concerns, there were other factors that seemed to make females less likely to enjoy VR. Several men surveyed mentioned that their wives have fears about hardware close to children’s brains and the disconnect from physical reality. The study authors also noted, “Women also appear less interested in VR due to their disinterest in video games and computer culture in general.” 

“One of the recommendations that we have is to include women in the design process, and actually all stages of VR development to make sure that it becomes and remains a digital technology that's equally accessible to women as it is to men,” Mado says. 

• Best VR and AR Systems for Schools 2021
• How VR and AR Can Be Used to Support Students with Special Needs

Education researchers have long known that having students teach their peers helps them learn. 

“Teaching is this generative activity where students are having to do something and discuss the information, make explanations, make summaries of it,” says Tricia Guerrero, a graduate student researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

However, time constraints make it a difficult strategy for teachers to implement. “You may not have time for every single student in your classroom to be able to study something and then every single student be able to teach it,” says Guerrero, who works in the Comprehension, Collaboration, and Creativity Lab in the Department of Psychology. 

While thinking about how time constraints limit the use of student teaching, Guerrero and her colleague Jennifer Wiley wondered if simply preparing to teach, but not actually delivering a lesson, would have a similar benefit. Some previous research suggested it might, although one small 2013 study didn’t find a benefit for preparing to teach alone. 

Guerrero and Wiley decided to perform a larger study and conducted two experiments with a total of more than 400 students. In both experiments, they found that having students merely prepare to teach significantly increased their understanding of a topic. The results of these experiments were recently published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Expecting to Teach: What the Study Found

In one experiment, Guerrero and colleagues worked with 206 undergraduate college students. All participants read a simple text on the Doppler Effect that was just over 500 words. Some were told to study the reading in order to prepare for a test, while others were told they’d have to teach the Doppler Effect and give a short lecture on it. 

Even though no students ever taught about the Doppler Effect, those who had been preparing to teach seemed to learn differently. A week later the students who prepared to teach scored 9 percent higher on factual recall and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences than the students who simply prepared for a test. 

A second experiment had 214 undergraduates read a more advanced and longer, 1,331-word text on fermentation. Once again some students were told to prepare for a test while others were told to prepare to teach. The results were similar to the first experiment: those expecting to teach out-performed those expecting a test. 

“When students were expecting to teach, they were highlighting more of the more important information in the text,” Guerrero says. “This tells us they were more cued into things that were more important to developing an understanding of the information. They also were making more connections between those pieces of information. That tells us not only were they understanding the concepts, but they were understanding how those concepts are related to one another.” 

She adds, “When you expect to have to teach, it changes how you engage in the learning process, and that leads to reinforcement of memory of the text, but also improvement in understanding.” 

Expecting to Teach: Classroom Implications  

An important takeaway of the study is its potential as a timesaving strategy. “I was a teacher for 10 years, and in the classroom, time is expensive,” she says. Using this study as inspiration, a teacher might assign all students to prepare a brief lecture on a subject but only have one or two students actually deliver the lecture or presentation.

More broadly, the study has implications about how teachers can help students use their study time most productively. 

“We can do a lot of things after students have already engaged in study to reinforce their understanding, such as having them write summaries, or explanations, or do some kind of practice tests,” Guerrero says. “But what this study tells us is that what we do prior to engaging in that study process can also affect how we learn. And so whether that's giving students different kinds of reading goals or instruction prior to learning, we can't just expect that students know what to do in the reading process. We actually have to give them instruction and information to help them to engage in the reading process at the right levels of processing.” 

• The Power of Pretesting: Why & How to Implement Low-Stakes Tests
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• Top 6 Research Stories of the Year

As we enter 2022 much like we entered 2021, we are uncertain of when the pandemic will end and unsure of what the ongoing health crisis means in the operation of schools across our nation. 

One might begin to consider that we are entering an endemic. According to a publication from Columbia Universities Mailman School of Public Health, the World Health Organization (WHO) identifies and declares a pandemic when a disease has spread exponentially each day more than the previous days. It is declared not according to the type of disease or severity of disease but rather by the spread and its impact on the world’s populations. An endemic is when a disease is consistently present but limited to a particular region, such as malaria, for example. Endemics are ongoing and become a way of life with some predictability in how diseases are spread. 

Perhaps it is also time to appreciate what we’ve learned along the way. We’ve certainly grown in better understanding grace, patience, forgiveness, collaboration, and the value of human beings supporting the community in selfless acts of kindness and support. Schools have also learned to be agile. 

Agility in schools requires compassion and planning. Students remaining at the focus of our attention are attended to for their social and emotional well-being as well as their academic progress. To continue doing this, teachers need support and resources, and leaders need guidelines and the freedom to implement those guidelines within their respective districts and schools. 

We saw a lot of this in 2021 and we will no doubt see much more in 2022. District leaders will be analyzing what has been working and what isn’t, and making necessary adjustments. They will need to consider past, current, and future practices, and refine strategies that support learners with a more agile and holistic learning environment.

Blended Learning Can Lead the Way 

One strategy districts continue to return to for academic improvement is blended learning. The model provides flexibility, allowing some students to learn face to face while others are online, or blended instruction for some instruction to be online while other instruction is face-to-face. 

No matter what flavor of blended learning your district adopts, there is plenty of research behind it. Research is essential in not only helping you understand how to improve your blended learning implementation but also how to measure the effectiveness of your program. 

Finding research is sometimes time-consuming and can be challenging. To help, here are a few studies you may want to check out that were published within the last two years around blended learning.

International Journal of Education Development: Modelling the Long-Run Learning Impact of the Covid-19 Learning Shock: Actions to (More Than) Mitigate Loss - In this study, the researcher states that remediation combined with a long-term reorientation of curriculum to align with children’s learning levels fully mitigates the long-term learning loss due to the shock and surpasses the learning in the counterfactual of no shock by more than a full year’s worth of learning. 

Building Effective Blended Learning Programs - The authors explore the differences between elearning and blended learning as well as explore new modern technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and learning models to improve blended learning.

A Blended Learning Strategy: Reimagining the Post-Covid-19 Architectural Education - The study encourages us to reimagine education using blended learning as a primary instructional model.

Combining the Best of Online and Face-to-Face Learning: Hybrid and Blended Learning Approach for COVID-19, Post Vaccine, & Post-Pandemic World - This paper offers an evidence-based approach on how instructors utilize both traditional and online instruction to create engaging learning experiences for students. 

Blended Learning is an Educational Innovation and Solution During the COVID-19 Pandemic - This study aims to find innovations and learning solutions during a pandemic, to support learning from home.

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Connecting assigned readings to classroom material can be a daunting task for many educators. However, having students relate with a primary source can be innovative, especially when items are available online. 

At Southern Connecticut State University's Hilton C. Buley Library, my university's library, students have the opportunity to view sources from past mayoral administrations, and I find the digitization process a transformational approach to understanding the importance of firsthand material. 

While textbooks tend to be the norm in academia, primary sources can be impactful for so many students. Speeches, memoranda, reports, and newspaper articles allow for mayoral eras to come alive. Buley Library has an immense collection of documents related to New Haven’s recent mayors, and many of these items are available online for students and public viewing. The collection is also discoverable when searching Google and the Digital Public Library of America. 

For a state university to collect, but also provide digital access to, primary sources is a rare feat. Archives and repositories such as Buley’s New Haven Mayoral Papers Collection are unique spaces for developing but also connecting education with research. 

Primary Source: Creating the Collection 

Head of Technical Services and Librarian Jacqueline Toce initially started the process of collecting and chronicling much of the material surrounding former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. (1994-2014). “We were very excited that Mayor DeStefano trusted us with his papers,” says Toce. “This is the first collection of its kind for Buley Library. But we knew we could do the job of digitizing because we had already begun to digitize other small collections in the library.”

Toce, the mayor, and his staff coordinated initial items, and then librarians identified specific sources to digitize through the Special Collections’ SouthernDigital site. It was a laborious and intricate process, which librarians chronicled in “How the DeStefano Papers Came to Buley.” Buley Library Director Clara Ogbaa notes that the Mayoral Papers Collection is of great historical and cultural value.

Following DeStefano’s repository donation, additional mayoral administrations followed suit, including papers from former mayors Toni Harp (2014-2020), John Daniels (1990-1994) and Biagio “Ben” DiLieto (1980-1990). Many of these documents came from former mayoral staffers and families. SCSU alumnus and prior city hall attorney, Neil Proto, added more documents and a generous donation for gathering further sources and interviews of mayoral staff members. My political science professor colleague Theresa Marchant-Shapiro and I interviewed various mayoral staff members as well as helped acquire additional sources.

Teaching With a Digitized Primary Source

For my own Connecticut Politics course, we read DeStefano’s newspaper editorials from his archival collection. I also assigned Douglas Rae’s City: Urbanism and Its End, which highlights several New Haven mayoral periods, and we spent class time at the “Righting Urban Renewal” exhibit (more details below) so they could connect a monograph with primary sources. Metadata Librarian Patrick Crowley was at the exhibit with the class and answered students’ questions. Students also have final projects and some have New Haven-related topics so they can access primary sources from the library’s collection. 

Some students have utilized the mayoral digitalization files for theses, papers, and additional projects. Nicholas Alexiades, for example, examined how Mayor DeStefano addressed public school education and school construction for his honors thesis. Within the mayor’s digitized files were various proposals, reports, and budgets that helped the student’s project. The papers have also been used by Yale University students in DeStefano’s urban politics courses. 

It’s one thing for students to read secondary sources such as monographs and journal articles, but it’s quite another to view primary sources at a mayoral repository through a public university library with digitized items. 

Connecting with Digitized Primary Sources 

• Center class discussions around archived material and assigned books 
• Coordinate projects among faculty, librarians, archivists, and administrators
• Highlight items and events with area media and community leaders  
• Hold public exhibits, lectures, and discussions on themed projects 

Beyond research, a couple of history faculty and I coordinated class discussions around the library’s digitalization of DeStefano’s documents. Professors Jason Smith and Stephen Amerman’s upper and lower level classes allowed students to directly engage in researching digitized material. 

Sharing With the Public 

Once much of these mayoral items were collected and digitized, Crowley and library interns helped organize a public exhibit highlighting mayoral administrations as well as archived material. “Righting Urban Renewal: Four Mayors Grapple with the Legacy of Urban Renewal in New Haven” is featured at SCSU’s Lyman Performing Arts Center. The exhibit opening received local media attention as the event brought together students, former mayors, and their staff. In addition, SCSU Arts and Sciences Dean Bruce Kalk organized and moderated an on campus and online discussion panel with librarians and professors utilizing the mayoral papers collection. 

As a researcher, I have helped coordinate various sources with librarians as well as started several academic projects. One recent article I co-wrote with journalism Professor Jodie Gil, “Researching SCSU’s Hilton C. Buley Library’s New Haven Mayoral Archives,” was recently featured in Connecticut History Review. This past spring we also presented our paper on DeStefano’s newspaper collection to the New England Political Science Association conference. 

Looking Back/Forward 

We look to create so many more potential projects to come from Buley Library’s mayoral collection. Economic development, education and public safety areas are just the beginning of policy topics to examine. As the librarians continue their digitization process, there are future exhibits and lectures to consider, including formal openings of these mayoral administration’s collections. To work with librarians and faculty across various academic departments has sparked countless ideas, and I have cherished this interdisciplinary experience.  

Archived material can be insightful, but having primary sources available for the public and digitized is especially impactful. Engaging with these sources online allows for so many to ultimately be a part of the researching and learning process. 

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Tech & Learning’s top education research stories of 2021 looked at new studies and trends in research that shed light on and raised new questions regarding how students of various ages learn. 

In a year of teaching that continues to be dominated by the evolving dynamics and challenges of the pandemic, it’s been inspiring to see educators the world over respond with new strategies. These are our favorite stories that explored new research and the science of learning. 

Video Learning May be More Effective Than In-Person Lectures 

Most schools have returned to primarily in-person instruction but it may not be time to throw away that external webcam just yet. Researchers in Australia looked at 105 studies and found that when students learned from video instead of more traditional in-person instruction, the average grade increased from a B to a B+. When students received video lessons in addition to an existing class, the impact was even greater, with the average grade rising from a B to an A. Michael Noetel, the study’s lead author and a psychologist at Australian Catholic University, says it’s not clear why this is but it may be because educators do a better job of editing themselves on video. “We lose all of the irrelevant stories, and students can skip the parts of our lectures that they think are boring,” he says. Having the learner be able to control the learning materials is also important. “When students can self-pace, they're much more likely to be able to catch up if they miss something,” he says. 

Ebook vs. Print Books  

Ebooks have surged in popularity since the pandemic began, however, new research led by Natalia Kucirkova, professor of Early Childhood and Development at the University of Stavanger in Norway and Open University, found that young children were less likely to understand ebooks unless they had effective enhancements. “We found a negative impact of digital books on children’s (ages 1-8) learning when comparing digital and print books, mirroring the results of meta-analyses with adult readers,” Kucirkova says. But her research also demonstrated that when it comes to childhood reading not all digital books are equal. “Our results are significantly moderated by the design of the tested digital books and may reflect the rather low quality of enhancements in the digital books available for young children.” 

High-Dosage Tutoring  

Building on years of research that have shown consistent advantages for high-dosage tutoring, many districts sought to bolster their tutoring programs in different ways, with some turning to services that could deliver assistance online. The intervention is viewed as one evidence-based way to combat pandemic learning losses. Matthew Kraft, associate professor of Education & Economics at Brown University, is a proponent of high-dosage tutoring yet warns that combatting the effects of the pandemic will be long and difficult. “Tutoring is a promising idea to integrate into a portfolio of approaches to support kids, but it's not a silver bullet,” Kraft says. “We need to frame tutoring much more about caring relationships between adults and kids that you add academics on top of, then just narrowly about academic acceleration. We need to meet the kids where they are, address their social and emotional learning needs, and then build on that.”

Flipped Classrooms Improve Student Academics and Satisfaction 

Proponents of flipped classrooms have long proclaimed the advantages of this pedagogy, but research backing these claims has been scattered and difficult to track down. A study published this year in the Review of Educational Research examined 317 high-quality studies (with a combined sample size of 51,437 college students) in which flipped classes were compared to traditional lecture classes taught by the same instructors. The researchers found significant advantages for flipped versus traditional lecture. In particular, partial flipped classrooms -- in which some but not all material followed the flipped model -- outperformed both traditional lecture classes and fully flipped classrooms. Lead author Carrie A. Bredow, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, believes this might be explained by two factors. First, partially flipped classrooms allow instructors to pick and choose the units that are best suited to the approach. “There might be some units within, say a math course, where you really just need to have that direct instruction, because doing that in class is gonna be more effective than putting it on a video,” she says. Second, partially flipping a class is easier for instructors, which could increase the course quality. “You're able to do maybe a better job at flipping certain sections than trying to flip everything at once,” Bredow says. 

Surveillance in Schools Associated With Negative Student Outcomes 

Cameras, metal detectors, and other forms of surveillance are designed to keep students safe but can lead to more suspensions, lower math scores, and fewer students attending college after graduation, according to a paper presented at the American Educational Association. For the study, researchers used data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Educational Longitudinal Study and looked at approximately 6,000 students. “We found that schools that rely heavily on metal detectors, random book bag searches, school resource officers, and other methods of surveillance had a negative impact relative to those schools who relied on those technologies least,” says Odis Johnson Jr., the lead author of the study and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Policy & STEM Equity at Johns Hopkins.

Therapy Dogs Reduce College Stress, Improve Executive Functioning

While the impact dogs have on reducing stress has long been noticed anecdotally, Patricia Pendry, professor in the human development department at Washington State University, wanted to quantify that impact. In a study published earlier this year, she and her colleagues found that spending just one hour per week for a month with therapy dogs led to a significant improvement in executive functioning for college students at risk of failing academically. While the reasons for these benefits are not always clear, there are some theories. “I'm a strong believer that through petting and touching the dog, there potentially is a release of oxytocin, which suppresses a stress hormone known as cortisol,” Pendry says. “And I think there is a temporary lowering of stress hormones in response to engaging with animals. We know that even just 10 minutes with a dog, reduces the amount of stress hormones that are circulating in the system.” 

Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University and author of books on pregnancy and parenting, and her team, have launched the COVID-19 School Data Hub. 

The website serves as a central database for educators, researchers, and policymakers looking to study and understand how the pandemic shaped students’ modes of learning in the 2020-21 school year and what the implications of that are going forward. It includes data from 31 states and more than 56,000 schools.

In a recent Q&A with Tech & Learning, Oster said she hopes it will bring K-12 educators and researchers together to answer pressing questions with actionable data. 

Q: What inspired you to start the COVID-19 School Data Hub? 

A: The school data hub project is an offshoot of the project we did last year, which was more specifically tracking COVID rates in schools. When we came to the end of last year, we were not planning to continue that project, but looking back over the school year, we realized that there was so much variation in opening and in what kind of access kids had to in-person school, and it was becoming increasingly clear that it might matter for a lot of outcomes, and that there wasn't a sort of systematic way to retain that data over time. And so, this is really an effort to do that in the service of our own research but, hopefully, also research and policy that others will do. 

Q: Any advice for how people can use and learn from the data hub? 

A: From the standpoint of individuals and policymakers, if you're interested in the broad picture of what was happening, there's a lot of ways to be interactive at either the overall national level or at the state level, just with maps and seeing how things move over time. Increasingly, we'll have research by us and others that will be available in the hub, so that people can start asking some questions. I hope people will tell us, “Hey, this is a question I want the answer to,” and maybe we can try to answer it. 

Q: What about those researching K-12? 

A: We built this all to be accessible to researchers. So the idea was to not just put up those maps, but say, “Here's the raw data. We cleaned it, so you can start using it right now.” So basically, if you have some outcome, be it parental employment, student mental health, something about test scores, sports participation, whatever it is, and you're interested in how that relates to schooling mode, you can go in and download the data. It'll be clean, it'll be in a usable format, it'll be coded up at an easy level, you can merge it right in, and you can start doing stuff right away. There's going to be an interest in being responsive and figuring out what kind of losses have we seen -- how are we going to fix them? Having the ability to do that quickly, without every individual researcher needing to privately deal with each individual state and inputting all the data on their own, that's the goal.

Q: Looking at the data over the past year, what are some of the big themes that have emerged? 

A: One big theme is who has this data, which is a slightly weird theme, but actually realizing the variation across jurisdictions and states in particular in how accessible this data is, is important. There are states where they know every week for every school how many kids are in each learning mode, and they can kind of get that for you in a spreadsheet. Then there are states where they actually have no idea what mode the district was in at all last year, like just nothing. They couldn't tell you anything about it. I mean, they could call the district, but nothing in terms of systematic data. Part of why that matters is highlighted by the pandemic, if you want to be able to affect policy at the district level, or say, ‘“We should all do the same mitigation,” or, “We should all do this kind of thing.”  

The other big thing is just geographic variation and demographic variation. There is a huge amount of variation across the U.S. in how much access people had to in-person schooling, with some areas having really quite a lot pretty consistently over the year and some areas having very low or none. Students of color and lower-income students are much less likely to have had access to in-person schooling, which we know, but it gets reinforced by the data. 

Q: What are some of the questions you and your team are looking at in relation to the pandemic and school? 

A: There are these learning loss questions, and there are these physical health questions. Our team is very interested in how we can think about what we're doing to fix those problems. It's one thing to kind of recognize that there are losses, but then a secondary piece of that is, ‘Well, now everybody's got a bunch of recovery money, so what are you going to do with it?’ 

This data hub, I think of as a kind of clearing house and an opportunity to pull in some information about that and just start to think about are there things that districts are doing or schools are doing that are particularly good for recovery. And that's gonna matter, of course, because while the current learning losses are unusual in their size, and the cause is somewhat unique, the fact that some kids are behind in learning is not unique to the pandemic. And so if we have the opportunity to learn about what kind of tutoring is most effective, for example, that feels like something that has implications beyond this particular moment.” 

Q: Anything else you’d like to add? 

A: I hope people are aware of this, and that they can use it to get a sense of what was going on broadly in their state and across the country. The call to action I would have is this is going to draw in a lot of people who are interested in answering questions that are of interest to schools. I think that the data hub is a coordination mechanism, as much as it is a data mechanism. And so there's an opportunity here for schools to have a reach into some research teams and say, “Hey these are the things we're really interested in answering.”

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