Young children learn an enormous amount through imitation. They learn to speak, use cutlery (although some seem to unlearn that skill as teenagers š), kick a ball, or tie their shoelaces by watching others and then trying it themselves. Watching and practising is a remarkably powerful way to learn. We also know that young children… Read More Do Young Children Learn Through More Than Imitation?
It has almost become an accepted truth, with social media bans becoming increasingly popular among politicians. Young people spend more and more time on social media. Mental health appears to be declining. So one must be causing the other. Over the past few years, numerous studies have reported an association between heavier social media use… Read More Does Time on Social Media Predict Later Mental Health? A Five-Year Study Suggests Not
A previous summer saved me from making a mistake on this blog. I came across a meta-analysis on AI in education and bookmarked it to write about later. By the time I returned to it, however, the study had started to fall apart. Although it had appeared in a top journal, many of the underlying… Read More Why This AI Meta-Analysis Tells Us Less Than It Seems
In the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Toolkit, outdoor (adventure) learning has its own entry. But there is one striking omission: no average effect size is reported. Why? The reason is simple. The evidence linking outdoor adventure learning to academic achievement remains very limited. The few available studies generally report positive findings, but there simply is… Read More Does adventure learning work? Yes… until you’ve been back at school for a while
Who would you say suffered the most from the COVID school closures? The obvious answer would be: students from the most disadvantaged families. And that’s true… but only partly. A new international study based on PISA data shows that the answer depends heavily on the country where students went to school during the pandemic. In… Read More Who Paid the Highest Price for COVID School Closures?
One of the most widely discussed educational innovations of the past fifteen years is undoubtedly the flipped classroom, helped in no small part by the attention generated by Khan Academy. Students engage with theoretical content before class, often through videos or other preparatory materials. Classroom time is then devoted to questions, applications, practice, and collaboration.… Read More When Does the Flipped Classroom Work in Higher Education?
“See? Humans actually can multitask.” I’ve had that message sent to me several times over the past month, usually by people who know I occasionally challenge the multitasking myth. The reason was a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The researchers trained participants more than 30,000 times to categorise novel, artificially morphed… Read More This Study Does Not Show That We Can Multitask
Teacher shortages remain one of the biggest challenges facing education across many countries around the world. The debate quickly turns to salaries or workload. Here in Flanders, it often centres on issues such as tenure and job security. These are certainly important topics. But a new review by Kenneth Leithwood and colleagues suggests that we… Read More Why Teachers Stay Has Less to Do with Salary Than You Might Think
Let’s start with the obvious: generative AI is rapidly entering classrooms, whether we like it or not. Recent surveys show that many teachers are already using AI, often to prepare lessons, create classroom activities, or generate tests. That makes sense, and an earlier Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) evaluation suggested that this does not necessarily come… Read More AI Can Make Teachers More Productive. But What About The Students?
Montessori remains one of the world’s most widely discussed educational approaches. For some, it is almost synonymous with high-quality education. For others, it is primarily a collection of appealing ideas supported by limited evidence. That makes every new research synthesis worth paying attention to. A new preregistered meta-analysis by Samuel LeĆ³n and colleagues sets out… Read More Montessori Under Scrutiny: What the Largest Review to Date Really Tells Us