Many studies have attempted to understand the learning loss resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic by studying the learning loss students typically experience during summer vacations. A new study, however, contends that more accurate lessons can be drawn from studies of unexpected and extended learning disruption due to other health emergencies like SARS or natural disasters.  This systematic review of the literature analyzed 15 studies, many of which were qualitative, focusing on the aftermath of crises that interrupted school learning. Several key themes arose. The most consistent was regarding the critical need for school leadership to center student and staff mental health with both a gentle return to normalcy and also flexibility. Curricula that offer students a chance to understand the event, process their experiences, and express themselves at their own pace can be helpful. Support for teachers can entail resisting the temptation for immediate changes following the crisis in favor...

Teacher preparation practices refer to the approaches, activities, and processes that teacher educators employ to enhance preservice teachers’ knowledge, skill, and dispositions. While researchers and policymakers have been actively identifying the most effective teacher preparation practices, the lack of rigorous evaluations of these practices is of concern because their effectiveness in different contexts remains unclear. Therefore, a recent review systematically examined the research designs of relevant studies conducted over the past two decades. An online database and hand search of relevant studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 2002 and 2019 yielded 166 eligible studies. In terms of internal validity, only 26.67% of the studies used a comparison group design to address maturation effects, and only 15.66% reported reasons why participants left during the study. Regarding measurement, 45.18% used a clearly defined and consistent rating scheme; 18.67% used measures developed by other researchers; 24.7% investigated the effect of teacher preparation practices...

Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning activity in which learners explain the material in a lesson to others after studying it.  Wang and colleagues conducted an experiment with 96 college students from a university in central China to compare three versions of learning-by-teaching, all without audience interaction but with varied levels of social presence, thereby leading to different levels of extraneous processing, which causes learners to engage in cognitive processing irrelevant to the instruction purpose (e.g., distraction). Participants studied a 2-minute video on chemical synaptic transmission for 9 minutes and prepared a brief lesson of less than 5 minutes under a randomly assigned one of three conditions: (1) teach-to-camera – teach to an imaginary audience by creating a video lecture; (2) teach-to-student – teach to an audience face-to-face; (3) teach-to-group – teach to seven people physically present in the room. Audiences in the latter two conditions provided no feedback. Data collecting...

Due to the growing number of early coding education programs designed for young children, there is increasing research interest in whether acquiring computational thinking (CT) can be transferred to other key developmental outcomes. A recent study by Yang and colleagues examined the link between computational thinking to sequencing ability and self-regulation in kindergarten students. Computational thinking was defined by researchers as the foundational concept needed to solve problems algorithmically, with solutions that can be reused in various contexts. Algorithmic thinking involves step-by-step operations that guide one towards achieving a goal. Based on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of cognitive abilities, the researchers hypothesized that CT would be related to both sequencing ability and self-regulation. Sequential ability, which entails identifying a series of steps to complete a task, was assessed by Picture Sequencing Task. Self-regulation comprising working memory, mental flexibility, and inhibitory control was measured by the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task. CT was measured by...

According to international and national assessments, US secondary school students struggle with math. Together with policymakers, specialists, and a team from the University of San Diego California, the San Diego Unified School District planned a four-year intervention based on the Changing the Odds (CTO) program. Aimed to improve students’ math performance, this teacher-centered program provided help in identifying students’ math learning needs and in designing interventions addressing these needs. In 2015, four low-performing middle schools of the San Diego Unified School District were appointed to implement the CTO program for four years, while four schools were matched for comparison on achievement and demographics. The four-year program provided materials for teaching and professional development; support for co-teaching, co-planning lessons, and assessing tests; opportunities for collaboration between schools; and a yearly Summer School. A recent NBER working paper evaluated the impact of Changing the Odds through a difference-in-difference approach. Because the testing...

Producing and making available evidence of effective educational programs is not enough to make it used in practice. Knowledge mobilization should be one of the key research areas to foster greater equity and responsiveness to educators’ needs. A study by Fitzgerald and Tipton focused on the communication of statistical data by studying how those data should be reported in order to facilitate decision-making based on evidence at school and policy levels. The authors proposed three main considerations. First, using the expression “the message sent may not be the message received,” they highlight that researchers set norms often not understood by practitioners. To overcome this issue, participatory research methods should be used to set norms. Second, practitioners and decision-makers are different from each other: they may work in large or small districts with diverse resources and educational backgrounds. The contexts where they work vary considerably based on the community they serve....

With the usage of smartphones becoming increasingly pervasive, taking photos to record information in class allows students to store more information with less effort. Many studies have demonstrated that longhand note-taking facilitates the deeper encoding of information and reduces mind-wandering, but little research has investigated the learning outcomes of the photo-taking strategy, so a recent study was conducted to compare their effectiveness. The sample of this study included 100 college students between the ages of 18-32 who were divided into three subgroups to listen to two lectures in three different conditions: listening with longhand note-taking, with photo-taking, and without note-taking. After they completed both lectures, participants reviewed their hand-written notes, photos they took, and plain printouts, respectively, to prepare for a recall test. The results revealed that students who took longhand notes outperformed the other two groups. A repetitive experiment was also done to probe participants’ mind-wandering behavior by asking...

Media multitasking is an increasingly common behavior where individuals use multiple forms of media simultaneously (e.g., listening to music while chatting through social media). Heavy media multitaskers may perform poorly in some cognitive control abilities, including inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. The “scatter attention hypothesis” suggests that heavy media multitaskers are more likely to be distracted by irrelevant information, leading to poorer performance on cognitive tasks. To investigate the association between media multitasking frequency with cognitive control, Kong and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis comparing cognitive control abilities between heavy (HMM) and light media multitaskers (LMM), while also examining potential moderators including age using two groups: adolescents (12-18 years old) and young adults (18-35 years old). The sample included 118 effect sizes from 43 studies that compared at least one component of executive function between HMM and LMM using the media multitask index (MMI) or a modified version of...

Executive function (EF) refers to a set of self-regulatory skills to consciously guide thoughts, actions, and emotions towards achieving goals. EF includes the cognitive aspect (“cool” EF) and the affective aspect (“hot” EF). Cool EF involves working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, while hot EF involves decision making based on emotions. In a recent study, Chen and Yeung compared how hot EF and cool EF link to academic skills across various ethnic groups of preschoolers in Singapore: Chinese, Malays, and Indians. Cool EF was represented by working memory (WM) and hot EF by delay of gratification (DoG) in the study. Two wave data were collected from a Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study in 2018/19 and two years later (2021). The study sample consisted of 2,527 children (70.7% Chinese, 19.9% Malays, 12.4% Indians) aged 36-83 months (M=58.9) during the first wave. Each child completed the WM and DoG tasks, and...