A recent analysis from Stanford University looked at more than 150,000 prompts from more than 4,400 K-12 teachers interacting with AI. The research provides a rare look at how teachers are actually using AI in practice, and most of these uses are fairly positive.

Teachers, the research suggests, are generally using the tool to help them build curriculum content and as a sounding board, all with an eye toward better helping students.

The research was conducted in partnership with SchoolAI, an AI-powered educational platform. Though it was based on data from Fall 2024, it still provides a compelling snapshot of how, where, and when many students are turning to AI.

Cynthia Chiong, Principal Research Scientist at SchoolAI, recently shared some of the highlights of the research with me.

1. Ways Teachers Are Using AI: More Than 40% of Teacher Prompts Focus On Curriculum

Chiong says this is a good sign, as it suggests teachers are using the tool to explain learning and not just automate tasks. In separate conversations with educators, she has found that many of these efforts are geared toward personalizing learning for students.

"For example, these three students here really want to focus on the sun,” she says. "While these other students are struggling with something else or are interested in another topic."

Chiong says that for a lot of teachers, being able to meet all these students where they are is the biggest draw of using AI.

2. AI As A Sounding Board

The research found that about 1 in 7 prompts involved a teacher reflecting or processing without making a specific request. This includes sharing a frustration, thinking through a challenge, or working something out.

Chiong says that these types of conversations and others teachers had with AI show that it’s an active process for educators. They might start with a question such as, “'How might I assess this math project that we've been working on?' but then they immediately go to a next thread of, ‘Okay, now, how do I put this back into a lesson to teach?’” she says.

Chiong adds, “So it's not like a one-and-done, but they're really thinking through the trajectory of learning for their students, and that was really cool to see.”

3. More Than 50% of Prompts Ask It To Generate Materials Such as Lesson Plans, Assessments, or Feedback

Teachers obviously find AI helpful when it comes to generating class material, but Chiong suggests that the data also shows teachers are not just plugging in a prompt and settling for the first output.

“The teachers are really driving the content,” she says. “It's not that the AI is like, ‘Oh, here is a lesson, this is how you should teach it.' But rather a teacher is saying, ‘Hey, I really want to teach something about evolution or whatever,' and that idea of how to teach it is still coming from that teacher entering that prompt.”

4. Half of Teacher AI conversations Include Fewer Than 10 Prompts

Teachers, by and large, are keeping their conversations with AI short, sweet, and to the point.

“They have a good sense of what they want to teach, and they have the curriculum already,” Chiong says. “So it's more a matter of translating what they already do into this new AI platform, and so it shouldn't take all that much time, and it is meant as more of a time saver and not a time taker.”

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

Most educators already know intuitively that large language models such as ChatGPT have the potential for AI bias, but a recent analysis from The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization demonstrates just how biased these models can be. 

The research found that AI models have “a strong and very significant tendency to reinforce gender stereotypes for men and women,” says Leona Verdadero, a UNESCO specialist in digital policies and the author of the analysis. The research also found that AI models had a tendency to enforce stereotypes based on race. 

Here’s what educators need to know about the UNESCO AI bias analysis and its findings. 

AI Bias: What Was Found  

For the analysis, researchers conducted tests of three popular generative AI platforms: GPT-3.5 and GPT-2 by OpenAI, and Llama 2 by META. One exercise was to give the AI platforms word association prompts. 

“Female names were very much closely linked with words like 'home,' 'family,' 'children,' 'mother,' while male names were strongly associated with words that related to business -- 'executive,' 'salary,' and 'career,'” Verdadero says. 

Another test consisted of having the AI models fill the blanks in a sentence. In one test when the models were prompted to complete a sentence that started “a gay person is ____,” Llama 2 generated negative content 70% of the time, while GPT-2 did so 60% of the time. 

Similarly disturbing results were garnered in tests regarding different ethnicities. When the AI models were prompted to describe careers held by Zulu people and asked the same question but about British people, the outcomes were markedly different. British men were given various occupations ranging from doctor to bank clerk and teacher, however, Zulu men were more likely to be given occupations including gardener and security guard. Meanwhile, 20% of the texts about Zulu women gave them roles as “domestic servants.” 

The researchers found GPT-3.5 was better than GPT-2 yet was still problematic. 

“We did find there was a reduction in overall bias, but still certain levels of biases exist, especially against women and girls,” Verdadero says. “There's still a lot of work that needs to be done.” 

Why AI Bias In Earlier Models Matters  

One might be tempted to dismiss the bias in less-advanced AI models such as GPT-2 or Llama 2, but that’s a mistake, Verdadero says. Even though these may not be cutting-edge tools they are still widely used across AI applications. 

“These are open source, and they’re foundational models,” she says, adding that these are used to power AI applications created throughout the globe, often by smaller tech companies in the developing world. 

“A lot of developers will use these open-source models to build new AI applications," she says. "You can just imagine building applications on top of these existing large language models already carrying a lot of bias. So there really is this risk to further exacerbate and amplify the biases already existing within these models.” 

What Educators Can Do  

UNESCO issued a global guidance for generative AI in research and education last fall. The guidance calls for a human-led approach to AI use that includes the regulation of GenAI tools, “including mandating the protection of data privacy, and setting an age limit for the independent conversations with GenAI platforms.” 

Beyond classroom-specific recommendations, UNESCO has also issued the Recommendations on The Ethics of AI, a framework that includes calls for action to ensure gender equality in the field. 

However, UNESCO policy makes it clear there is only so much that can be done in the classroom. The organization believes it's primarily the responsibility of governments to regulate generative AI, and to shape the market to ensure AI does not have harmful outcomes. 

"After governments, we hold private companies accountable,” Clare O’Hagan, a press officer at UNESCO specializing in the ethics of technology, says via email.  “Although there are many things which educators can do, UNESCO still places the responsibility for controlling the downsides of AI squarely with governments.” 

• Navigating AI Biases in The Classroom
• How Can Teachers Reduce Bias?

A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words. 

New research has found that students who take notes outperform students who photograph slides during an online lecture. 

Dr. Sarah Shi Hui Wong, an instructor at the National University of Singapore, and the lead author of the paper describes the research on taking notes, explains how the study was conducted, what inspired it, and how she discusses the research with her students.

What Inspired Research on Taking Notes?  

“In recent years, we’ve seen many students whipping out their smartphones to take photos of lecture materials,” Wong says. “As educators, we’ve sometimes found ourselves suddenly becoming unwitting celebrities faced with a sea of cameras in lectures.” 

Technology has equipped students with more note-taking tools for quickly and conveniently recording information, however, she says, "What’s less clear is how these newer methods actually fare against traditional ones such as longhand note-taking.”  

Wong and her colleagues wanted to determine whether students learn better by writing notes, taking photos, or not taking any notes or photos at all, a surprisingly understudied area. 

How Was The Research Conducted?  

Two hundred college students were recruited as part of two experiments. In both, students were presented with a series of video-recorded lectures and were randomly assigned to either write notes, take photos using their smartphone camera, or not take any notes or photos. 

“The lectures comprised PowerPoint slides with audio narration, much like how many online lessons are delivered,” Wong says.  “Before the lectures, we told all students that they would later be tested on the material. All students were also informed of and provided with a review opportunity before the test. This was important because students often take notes or photos precisely so they can revisit them later when preparing for an exam.”

After watching the lecture, note-takers reviewed their handwritten notes, photo-takers reviewed their photos, and students who didn’t take notes were given exact printouts of the lecture slides to review. 

“Since photos and printouts would only contain information that had been visually presented on the slides, we ensured that the audio narration in the lectures overlapped closely with the onscreen content, so that photo-takers and no-note-takers wouldn’t be unfairly disadvantaged,” Wong says. “After the review opportunity, the students were tested on their recall of the lecture content by typing as much as they could remember. This typing procedure ensured that all students did the test using a medium that was different from what they had used during the lectures. Otherwise, a pen-and-paper test may unfairly favor note-takers who had similarly studied the lectures by writing notes.” 

What The Research Found

“Across both experiments, we consistently found that note-takers remembered more information from the lectures than photo-takers or no-note-takers,” Wong says. “In fact, photo-takers performed just as poorly on the test as their peers who didn’t take any notes at all.” 

Wong adds, “The longhand advantage occurred even though note-takers only managed to write down about 50% of the lecture content in their notes, whereas photo-takers and no-note-takers could access up to 100% of the lecture content in their photos or printouts during review.” 

In the second experiment, Wong and her colleagues also looked at mind-wondering in the note-takers vs. other groups. 

“We found that photo-takers and no-note-takers reported mind-wandering more frequently during the lectures than note-takers, and this attentional difference predicted the students’ later test performance,” Wong says. “Put together, our results show that writing notes reduces mind-wandering more than photo-taking or no-note-taking. In turn, this attentional advantage improves students’ learning and memory of lecture content.” 

What Wong Tells Her Students About the Research  

“In my classes, I now share this study with my students and we discuss how they can apply the findings to their learning,” Wong says. “I encourage my students to take notes and put aside their smartphone – camera –  during class. In my experience, discussing the science of learning with students through such research also piques their interest and curiosity in questioning what kinds of study methods are more effective and why.”  

Other Questions and Potential Causes

Wong’s study did not compare longhand note-taking to typed note-taking on a laptop. That question has been researched in the past and the results are mixed. 

“An early study found that longhand note-taking yields better test performance than laptop note-taking, but some recent replications have not found definitive evidence for this effect,” she says. 

In addition, there is still more to learn about exactly why note-taking seems so beneficial to learning. “Other studies have shown that students learn better when they engage in generative processes such as summarizing, organizing, and integrating information during note-taking,” Wong says. “These generative processes enable students to learn the material deeply and meaningfully, and are not mutually exclusive with the role of mind-wandering.” 

The quality of students’ notes also matters. "If students take notes by simply transcribing their teacher’s words verbatim instead of engaging in generative processes, then they are less likely to learn deeply," says Wong. "Rather, it’s important to guide students on how to take high-quality notes for their effective learning.” 

• 4 Tips for Outsmarting Your Brain From a Cognitive Psychologist
• Busting The Myth of Learning Styles
• 5 Teaching Tips Using Brain Science

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

Emmy Werner studied resilience, at a time when resilience research was not widely recognized, as a resource to help traumatized children outside of scholarly literature, until now. Werner’s work is based on a remarkable longitudinal study that tracked hundreds of children who were born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955, over four decades.

One out of three of the children from Kauai identified as high-risk grew into unexpectedly competent, confident, and caring adults. They did not develop behavior or learning problems during childhood or adolescence. They succeeded in school, managing home and social life well. These children grew into adults who were somehow able to overcome incredible odds, leading to successful and fulfilling lives. 

This study challenged the persistent belief that at-risk children cannot succeed. How did they beat the odds?

A consistent pattern of protective factors were revealed in these resilient children:

1. Protective factors within the individual: These included characteristics such as intelligence, a positive outlook, a sense of humor, and a talent or interest that provided a sense of purpose and identity. 
2. Protective factors in home life: These included having at least one supportive and involved opportunity to establish a close bond with at least one competent, emotionally stable person who was sensitive to their needs, often substitute caregivers such as grandparents, older siblings, aunts, or uncles. 
3. External factors: These included access to supportive social networks, such as teachers, mentors, and peers, and opportunities for involvement in activities that fostered positive relationships and skills development. 

The second and third factors are provisions that schools and communities can foster, but the first factor may seem dependent on the individual. Yet, internal resilience can be learned, resulting in these protective factors interacting in a synergy that compounds positive long-term consequences. Indeed, schools and communities can implement the lessons learned from Werner’s study. More evidence across other studies provide validation for generalizing strategies to disadvantaged children in schools. 

Learning Resiliency from Historical Patterns 

A more recent tragedy, with parallels to post-Covid student trauma, was conducted for Katrina hurricane survivors. This disaster wiped out much of the city of New Orleans in 2005.  Researchers published findings on “resilience outliers” a decade later, in Children of Katrina. These kids were displaced from school and home for a year, and had no digital access to connect to their educational or social lives. 

Similar to the pandemic, 100,000 post-Katrina students were isolated, stripped of critical developmental and social learning opportunities. However, the researchers found individuals who had not only survived, they went on to lead successful, thriving young adult lives. As with Werner’s findings, a sense of strong community helped Katrina kids rebuild their lives. And like the Kids of Kauai, having a strong support network helped those traumatized children experience post-traumatic growth.

Patterns in history reinforce solutions. Moving ahead to 2014, Google researched who their most successful employees were. The assumption was that those who went to prestigious universities topped the list. Certainly, they were given the conditions to succeed, except they were beaten out by individuals who had endured a trauma at some point in their lives, and excelled not despite, but perhaps because of, the lessons learned from overcoming. 

This study reinforced that not all is lost. In fact, resilience is sometimes best learned through real-life challenges. Incorporating protective factors helps traumatized individuals draw strength, rather than weakness, from circumstances.

Expectations and Outcomes 

The Pygmalion Effect, another study regarding school community support that dates back a half century, showed how teachers who were told certain students were gifted, expected them to excel academically. Another group of students, they were told, were average. In reality, there was no difference between these groups. Yet the teachers treated the perceived gifted as more intelligent, providing them with more attention, encouragement, and opportunities. 

As a result, the perceived gifted students demonstrated gifted levels of performance while their peers performed as expected, with average performance. The Pygmalion effect revealed higher expectations leading to better performance. 

Teacher perceptions and attitudes toward students often include unintended biases. Being conscious of this can help all children, by pushing past our biases to create supportive learning communities, so all children are given opportunities to excel. 

Consider a template to guide educators:

• Teaching resilience to children so they can learn to persevere. Resilience building can often be achieved through inspirational stories of overcoming trauma.
• Provide strong affiliations to mentors, coaches, and teachers to foster a sense of connection to adults in the life of children in need.
• Provide outlets for supportive social networks, such as teams, clubs, religious affiliations, and other organizations to connect students to these children.  

While not a failsafe, these actions, as evidenced, certainly increase the odds of success for those who have had to overcome barriers in early life. Stacking these strategies together further compounds the likelihood of success for many students, certainly more than without. 

• Reversing Digital Disruption for Students
• How to Lead Post-Pandemic Students to Thrive After Years of Isolation

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

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. 

• How to Use Digital Newspaper Archives in Your Class
• Fact-Checking Sites for Students

In the classroom, failure can be more productive than success.

A new study published in Review of Educational Research finds that STEM students are more successful when learning a new concept if they engage in problem-solving followed by instruction rather than if they receive instruction and then engage in problem-solving. Students perform even better when the initial problem-solving is designed with the principles of productive failure in mind. 

While the potential for productive failure has long been recognized in the education field, researchers were surprised by the extent of the benefit they saw in this study. 

“These are breakthrough findings,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Tanmay Sinha, a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. “The effect size just by reversing the order of problem-solving and instruction is about two times that of what you would gain with an outstanding teacher over the course of a year. And if you implement productive failure principles, the effect is about three times stronger.”  

Effective Productive Failure Design  

For the study, Sinha and co-author Manu Kapur analyzed 53 studies that looked at STEM students globally. The students ranged from second grade to the postgraduate level, though a majority of the studies were conducted with students grades 6-10 from North America, Europe, and Asia. 

Sinha and Kapur found successful productive failure strategies were guided by a few key principles. The type of question asked during the initial problem-solving exercise is important, Sinha says. “You won't pick up a standard textbook problem and just give it to students beforehand,” he says. “The problem has to be designed in a particular way, the language has to be nontechnical. It has to be intuitive, there has to be some kind of contrasting case so that students can compare between different data sets.” 

Group work can also help make pre-lecture problem-solving more effective because it allows students to learn from one another, and then together they can increase their problem-solving abilities. 

In addition, the type of instruction given after the initial problem-solving phase should not be a standard lecture. “If you give this kind of a problem to novices, they will make mistakes, and they will try out different ways of solving the problem,” Sinha says. “So the instruction then has to build on these incorrect solutions or sub-optimal solutions rather than just telling students, ‘This is the right way to solve it.’” 

Productive Failure: Limitations and Takeaways for Educators 

There are limits to productive failure’s efficacy. Problem-solving proceeding direct instruction did not hold the same advantage for second and fifth graders as it did for older students, and a direct instruction-first approach was equally as effective for teaching procedural skills. 

“If you have to learn how to compute a procedure for say, standard deviation, instruction first will work as well as a problem-solving first design,” Sinha says. But for students to understand why they performed the steps to reach a final answer or to apply standard deviation to a different problem, beyond the current context, a problem-solving first approach appears to work much better. 

Utilizing productive failure in your classroom does not require you to revamp your instruction. At Sinha’s university, he works with instructors to come up with strategies for incorporating the approach into their classes with small-scale changes. For example, many educators assign students to practice questions after a class, but he’ll ask them to assign the questions before a lecture with some tweaks to enhance their adherence to productive failure principles. 

“The students are more prepped for the lecture that's going to follow,” he says. “It’s just shifting some of the exercises back, but you keep the structure of your class the same. You don't create radical changes, you don't go in and ask the instructor to completely flip what they have been doing.” 

• New Research: Flipped Classrooms Improve Student Academics and Satisfaction
• Why Traditional Lectures Won’t End Anytime Soon in Higher Ed Despite Better Approaches Being Available

Recently, researchers at REACH, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, at Tulane University, released a study examining the relationship between school reopenings and local hospitalizations for Covid-19 nationwide. The study found that the U.S. counties in which Covid-19 hospitalizations were already low, reopening schools was not associated with increased hospitalizations. However, as hospitalizations increased it was impossible to tell what impact reopening schools had.  

The researchers also published a spreadsheet, providing comparable data for every county in the country and making it easier for school officials to compare these thresholds to current health conditions. 

Douglas N. Harris, the study’s co-author, a professor of economics at Tulane University, and director of REACH, shared some of the study’s key takeaways for educators and school officials. 

Why This Study is Different  

Previous studies looking at whether in-person school drives coronavirus spread have been forced to rely on positivity rates, which Harris says hasn’t given researchers a clear answer. 

“When schools open, they actually change the amount of testing that goes on in the communities,” Harris says. Teachers and students are more likely to be tested regularly, which can drive up the positivity rate, making it hard to determine whether there is more spread or just more tests.

By focusing on hospitalization, Harris and his co-authors were able to eliminate these variables. This method has the additional benefit of factoring out those who test positive but have mild or no symptoms. “What we really care about is health outcomes,” Harris says. 

What Researchers Found in Counties Where Hospitalizations Were Low

In counties where new hospitalization rates were less than 36 to 44 people per 100,000 per week, the study’s authors found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates. 

In fact, the study suggests that reopening schools seemed to decrease hospitalizations. “When there was little spread to begin with, opening schools had no effect and may have actually improved things,” Harris says. 

This possible connection between open in-person schools and reduced spread could be due to two factors, says Harris. First, students and their families may be more cautious in general because they don’t want to spread the virus to their classmates and teachers. “Another reason is you have to think about what the alternative is. So students are not in school, they're at home. What are they doing at home? Well, we don't know,” Harris says. 

What Researchers Found in Counties Were Hospitalizations Were Higher 

In communities where new hospitalizations of people with the virus average above 36 to 44 people per 100,000, the picture is much less clear. 

“The results were inconclusive,” Harris says. “I think that's why we're seeing so many inconsistent studies on this topic. When you have a large number of hospitalizations to start with, or a large positivity rate, the dynamics of this process are just so complicated that it becomes hard to really isolate.” 

He adds, “In some cases, we see signs that opening schools did increase hospitalizations when there were a lot of hospitalizations to start with. In other cases, we still didn't see any evidence, but we wanted to be cautious and conservative and not draw conclusions given the inconsistency in the results.”  

How Administrators Can Use The Study to Inform Decisions 

Administrators should consider three factors when deciding between remote or in-person classes, says Harris. 

“One is can the schools reopen in an instructionally sound way? Recognizing that what in-person instruction really means right now is some combination of in-person and remote,” Harris says. To accomplish this hybrid scenario effectively, schools must be able to have instructors who have the time and resources to teach students who may be kept home by concerned parents or by quarantine requirements. 

Next, administrators need to consider the indirect public health consequences of keeping schools closed to in-person learning. “We're sacrificing a lot by having schools closed right now, and not just in a learning sense, but in a public health sense,” Harris says. 

The third consideration is what impact reopening will have on the spread of Covid-19. “Basically, what our study does is for the majority of counties, it sort of shifts the balance of those trade-offs toward reopening,” Harris says. 

• The Future of Hybrid Learning
• What Research Shows About Screen Time for Students

Research shows that when students are unable to read proficiently by the end of third grade, they usually struggle throughout their academic career. So the fact that the majority of fourth graders eligible for free or reduced lunches only scored at or below the Basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 2017 reading assessment is a matter of serious concern. To identify the instruction most effective at advancing literacy skills for students from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds, Lexia Learning, a Rosetta Stone® (NYSE: RST) company, conducted a three-year longitudinal study with students in early elementary grades. The study and its results have been published in the academic peer-reviewed journal Computers in the Schools: Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory, and Applied Research.

Common Sense today published a new research report, Social Media, Social Life: Teens Reveal Their Experiences.

[GoGuardian Announces Beacon, Self-Harm Prevention Tool for Schools]

Highlights include:

• Teens are on social media for much of the day. Seventy percent of teens use social media multiple times a day (up from 34 percent in 2012) with 16 percent saying they use it "almost constantly" and a total of 38 percent saying they use it multiple times an hour.
• Social media distracts them from some important stuff. Fifty-seven percent agree that social media often distracts them when they should be doing homework, and 54 percent of teens say that using social media "often distracts me when I should be paying attention to the people I'm with."
• Exposure to hate speech is on the rise, while cyberbullying is less common.All told, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of teen social media users in 2018 say they "often" or "sometimes" come across racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious-based hate content in social media. Thirteen percent of teens report "ever" being cyberbullied, and more than one in five teens (23 percent) has tried to help someone who has been cyberbullied.

For a summary of key findings and to download the full report, visit.www.commonsensemedia.org.

[Do you have an innovative edtech product? Nominate it for the Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence Contest! Click here for details]

New research from NewBay’s AV Technology and Tech & Learning magazines—from a poll of more than 200 users of educational technology in K–12 and higher education—shows how technology leads to increased engagement and more use of online resources, thereby improving educational outcomes. Although the survey showed that many higher education and K–12 schools remain at a crossroads in terms of making a full transition to technology, the vast majority of those who responded are excited about what they’re accomplishing today and are equally excited about moving quickly to implement better ways of teaching with online curriculum and to take advantage of online avenues for research, better displays, video conferencing, and more. While there’s still a technology gap in many schools, it’s a gap that up-to-date projectors, large displays, better networking/connectivity solutions, and better teaching software can fill. The survey results offer a roadmap showing what technology and tech-based pedagogical methods are working for schools today, as well as what’s to come.

Click here to download the full white paper.